THE CONVERT: 



OR, 



//^. 2/ ^^/ 



LEAVES FROM MY EXPERIENCE. 






BY 



0. Af BKOWNSON. 




K^/in 



^7 



NEW YOEK : 

EDWARD DUNIGAN & BROTHER, 

(JAMES B. KIRKER,) 



371 BROADWAY. 
1857. 






Entebed according to Act of Congress, in the year 1857, by 

JAMES B. KIRKER, 

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District of New York. 



TO THE 

BISHOP OF BOSTON, 

THIS tTNPEETENDING YOLUME 

18 MOST RESPEOTFULLY DEDICATED 

AS A 

FEEBLE MAEK OF THE VENERATION FOR HIS VIRTUES 

AND THE 

DEEP GRATITUDE FOR HIS SERVICES 

TO THE COiyVERT 

CHERISHED BY HIS SPIRITUAL SON, 

THE AUTHOR. 



PREFACE. • ^ ^ 

The volume here offered to the reading public is no work of 
fiction, and the person who gives an account of himself is no 
imaginary person around whom I have chosen to weave pas- 
sages from my own experience. The person who tells his 
story is myself, and I have aimed to tell my story, so far as it 
bears on my religious convictions and experience, with sim- 
plicity, frankness, and truthfulness. The book, whatever else 
it may or may not be, is an honest book. 

I have traced, with all the fidelity I am master of, my en- 
tire religious life from my earliest recollection down to my ad- 
mission into the bosom of the Catholic Church, I have con- 
cealed none of my errors, disguised none of my changes, and 
sought to represent myself at no period as better or worse 
flian I was. My aim has been neither to vindicate nor to 
condemn myself, but simply to tell the truth. 

Though I am the hero of ray book, and speak in the first 
person, I trust the reader will not find me immoderately 



VI PREFACE. 

egotistic. I have not written to give myself importance in 
the eyes of the public, or from a feeling that my story, simply 
as mine, could have any great interest or value. Nearly all 
that is contained in the volume derives whatever value or im- 
portance it may have from sources independent of my person- 
ality. 

What is related as matter of fact, unless my memory has 
played me tricks, may be read with entire confidence. The 
principles and reasonings set forth, and the judgments offered, 
speak for themselves, and must go for what they are worth. 
Truth is not mine, nor my reader's, and is the same whatever 
may be his or my opinions. It is above us both, and inde- 
pendent of us, and all that either of us should aim at is to as- 
certain and conform to it. I have no vocation to dogmatize or 
to teach. If what I eay carries conviction,, accept it ; if not, re- 
ject it, or suspend judgment till better informed. 

The reader will at once perceive that my book is not de- 
signed to flatter one or another sect or party. I have ex- 
pressed freely, frankly, unreservedly, my honest thought of 
persons and things that have come in my way, the results of 
my most careful observations and of my best judgment. I 
have not addressed my work especially to Catholics or to non- 
Catholics, but to the public at large. My purpose has been 
to render to all who may take an interest in the matter, an 
account of my conversion to Catholicity, and to enable the 



PREFACE. VU 

curious in such matters to discover the connecting Hiik be- 
tween my past and my present Hfe, in order to enable them to 
discover the connecting link between nature and grace, the 
natural and the supernatural, and to perceive that in becom- 
ing a Catholic a man has no occasion to divest himself of his 
nature, or to forego the exercise of his reason. 

In my references to Catholic faith and doctrine, I believe 
I am orthodox, but in all such matters I recognize the Church, 
under God, as the only infallible teacher. I am a Catholic, and 
it would be in bad taste to seek to conceal or to disguise the 
fact. I have no wish to force my Cathohc faith upon those who 
loathe its bare mention, but for myself I glory in it, and con- 
sider submission to the teaching of the Church the noblest ex- 
ercise I can make of my reason and free will. 

My book, however, is the free production of my own 
mind, the free expression of my own honest convictions as 
formed by my experience, the inspiration of grace, and the 
teachings of Catholic faith and theology, and maybe taken by 
my readers as a specimen of that freedom which Catholicity 
secures to all her children. 

The temper of the book, I hope, will be found acceptable 
to every class of readers, — free from all bitterness, harshness, 
or severity. It is not a controversial work, but a simple nar- 
rative, which may or may not carry with it a moral ; and my 
aim has been to treat all of whom I have occasion to speak 



Vm PREFACE. 

with fairness and liberality, and to acknowledge cheerfully 
real worth wherever I find it. I may have erred in my judg- 
ments, but not from bigotry,^ prejudice, or an intolerant dispo- 
sition. 

I have aimed to tell my story simply, and to keep as clear 
as possible of all abstruse metaphysical or theological discus- 
sions ; yet as I had in some parts the profoundest problems 
of human hfe to deal with, and as my own path to the 
Church led through the field of philosophy, I have not 
been able wholly to avoid them, and there are parts of the 
w^ork which will have little interest for those who read only for 
amusement. I have aimed to write an instructive, not an 
amusing book. 

The historian of the aberrations of human reason during the 
last half century will, if I am not much mistaken, find this 
volume not unworthy of his attention. The accounts I 
have given of the various sects, schools, and parties with which 
I came at different times in contact, together with the sketches 
I have ventured of their founders and chiefs, will be found, I 
think, devoid neither of interest nor value. These accounts 
and sketches might have been greatly extended, but I have 
made it a rule to confine myself to what served to illustrate 
my own story, and those contemporary movements and indi- 
viduals that exerted little or no influence upon my own opin- 
ions or relations, I have passed over as foreign to my subject. 



PREFACE. IX 

With these prefatory remarks, wholly unnecessary on my 
part, I commit my volume to the public to make or mar its for- 
tune. It embodies no small portion of fifty years of an active, 
perhaps feverish intellectual life, devoted to serious and earnest 
purposes, with what obstacles and with what results it tells in 
a plain, unpretending style. In writing it I have had occasion 
to review my whole past life, and to renew my thanks to Him 
who died that we might live, for having conducted me after 
so many wanderings from the abyss of doubt and infidelity to 
the light and truth of his Gospel, in the bosom of his Church, 
where I find the peace and repose so long denied me. 

New York, September 16, 1857. 

THE AUTHOR. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

Childhood and Youth. . . . . .1 



CHAPTER 11. 
Peesbyteeian Experience, . . . .18 

CHAPTER III. 
Become a Univeesalist, . . . . .33 

CHAPTER lY. 
Univeesalibm Unsatisfaotoet, ... 60 

CHAPTER y. 
Become a Woeld-Refoemee, . . . .83 

CHAPTER YI. 
Methods of Woeld-Refoem, . . . .107 

CHAPTER YII. 
The Woeking Men, ..... 128 

CHAPTER YHI. 
Religion of Humanity, .... 144 



XU CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER IX. 
Union and Peogress, . . . . .162 



PAOK 



CHAPTER X. 
My "New Views," 182 

CHAPTER XL 
Saint-Simonism, ...... 199 

CHAPTER XII. 

HOREIBLE DOCTEINES, ..... 218 

CHAPTER XIII. 
Getting Bettee, . . . ^. . . 240 

CHAPTER XIY. 
Man no Chtjeoh-Buildee, .... 268 

CHAPTER XY. 
Providential Men, . . . . . 293 

CHAPTER XYI. 
Struggles after Light, . . . .319 

CHAPTER XYII. 
A Step Foeward, ...... 342 

CHAPTER XYIIL 
Become a Catholic, . . . . .368 

CHAPTER XIX. 
Belief on Authority, . . . . .397 

CHAPTER XX. 
Conclusion, . . . . . .418 



THE CONVERT. 



CHAPTEE I. 



CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 



I WAS bom in the town of Stockbridge, Windsor 
County, Vermont, September 16, 1803. My father 
was a native of Hartford County, Connecticut ; my 
mother of the beautiful village of Keene, New 
Hampshire. At the age of six years I was placed 
with an aged couple in the town of Eoyalton to be 
brought up. The man, when I went to live with 
him, was upwards of sixty ; his wife was about fifty. 
They were plain country people, living on a small 
farm, and supporting themselves by their own in- 



a THE CONVERT. 

dustiy. They had been brought up in New England 
Congregationalism^ were honest, upright, strictly 
moral, and far more ready to suffer wrong than to 
do wrong, but had no particular religion, and seldom 
went to meeting. 

I was treated with great kindness and affection, 
and as well brought up as could be expected from 
persons in their condition of life. They taught me 
to be honest, to owe no one any thing but good will, 
to be frugal and industrious, to speak the truth, 
never to tell a lie under any circumstances, or to take 
what was not my own, even to the value of a pin ; 
to keep the Sabbath, and never to let the sun go 
down on my wrath. In addition they taught me 
the Shorter Catechism, the Apostles' Creed, the 
Lord's Prayer, and a short evening prayer in rhyme, 
which ran, 

'^ Now I lay me down to sleep, 
I pray the Lord my soul to keep ; 
If I should die before I wake 
I pray the Lord my soul to take." 

Properly speaking I had no childhood, and have 
more of the child in my feelings now than at eight 



CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 3 

or ten years of age. Brought up with old people, 
and debarred from all the sports, plays, and amuse- 
ments of children, I had the manners, the tone, and 
tastes of an old man before I was a boy. A sad mis- 
fortune ; for children form one another, and should 
always be suffered to be children as long as possible. 
Both childhood and youth are quite too short with 
us, and the morals and manners of the country suf- 
fer from it. 

I early learnt to read, and was from my earliest 
recollection fond of reading ; but we had few books, 
and our neighbors had fewer. Our family library 
consisted of a Protestant version of the Scriptures, 
a London edition ; Watts's Psalms and Divine 
SongSj and The Franklin Primer^ to which were 
subsequently added Edwards's History of Bedemp-- 
tion ; Davies's Sermons ; a History of the Indian 
Wars, by a Dr. Sanders, I believe, at one time Pre- 
sident of the Vermont University at Burlington ; a 
mutilated copy of Philip Quarle, sl work of fiction, 
written in imitation of Defoe^s Rohinson Crusoe ; 
and during the war of 1812 with Great Britain, a 
weekly newspaper, published in Windsor by Alden 



4 THE CONVERT. 

Spooner. My reading was confined to these works^ 
and principally to the Scriptures^ all of which I had 
read through before I was eight, and a great part of 
which I knew by heart before I was fourteen years 
old. 

My thoughts from my earliest recollection took 
a religious turn, and my greatest pleasure was in 
conversing or in hearing others converse on the sub- 
ject of religion. When about nine years old I was 
permitted to accompany a much older boy to " the 
middle of the town/' about four miles distant from 
our residence, to witness a muster, or general train- 
ing of a brigade of militia. On returning home I 
was asked what I had seen to interest me. I an- 
swered that I had seen two old men talking on reli- 
gion. In fact I was so much interested in their dis- 
cussion that I quite forgot the soldiers, though I 
came of a military family, and almost forgot to eat 
my card of gingerbread. The discussion, I remem- 
ber, was on free will and election, and I actually 
took part in it, stoutly maintaining free will against 
Edwards, who confounds volition with judgment, 
and maintains that the will is necessarily determined 



CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 9 

by the state of the aflfections and the motives pre- 
sented to the understanding. 

The simple history of the passion of our Lord, 
as I read it in the Evangelists, affected me 
deeply. I hung with delight on the Mystery of Ee- 
demption, and my young heart often burned with 
love to our Blessed Lord, who had been so good as to 
come into the world, and to submit to the most 
cruel death of the cross that he might save us from 
our wicked dispositions, and make us happy for ever 
in heaven. I wanted to know every thing about 
him, and I used to think of him frequently in the 
day and the night. Sometimes I seemed to hold 
long familiar conversations with him, and was deep- 
ly pained when any thing occurred to interrupt 
them. Sometimes, also, I seemed to hold a spiritual 
intercourse with the Blessed Mary, and with the 
Holy Angel Gabriel, who had announced to her that 
she was to be the mother of the Eedeemer. I was 
rarely less alone than when alone. I did not specu- 
late on the matter. It all seemed real to me, and 
I enjoyed often an inexpressible happiness. I pre- 
ferred to be alone, for then I could taste the sweets 



6 THE CONVEKT. 

of silent meditation, and feel that I was in the 
presence of Jesus and Mary, and the holy angels ; 
yet I had not been baptized, and had very little in- 
struction except such as I had obtained from reading 
the Holy Scriptures. 

The earliest wish I recollect to have formed with 
regard to my future life, was to be a minister of re- 
ligion, and to devote myself to the work of bringing 
people to the knowledge and the love of God. For 
this I longed to go to school, to get learning, to grow 
up, and to be a man. I early looked upon myself as 
one called and set apart to the service of religion. I 
had an irritable temper, and was subject to violent 
outbreaks of passion, but I tried hard to control my- 
self, and neither to do nor to think any thing wrong, 
and till I was man grown, I do not believe I ever 
suffered the sun to go down upon my wrath. I had 
my faults as weU as others, and did many things 
which were by no means right or excusable ; but my 
conscience was active, and I always felt a deep re- 
morse for them, and was ready always to do all in 
my power, to submit to any humiliation however 
great, to repair the faults I committed, or the 



CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 7 

wrongs I did. I always felt that the next best 
tiling to never doing wrong, was to own the wrong 
done, and endeavor to undo it. So it was with me 
in my -childhood, till I was fourteen years of age, 
when I left the kind old people, who had thus far 
brought me up, and went forth into the world alone, 
to make my way as best I could. 

My youth was not as blameless as my childhood, 
and it was far less happy. Keligion, however, 
never lost its place in my thoughts. But unhappi- 
ly, while I had strong religious affections, and the 
elements of Christian behef, I belonged to no 
Church, and had no definite creed. True, I had 
been taught the Shorter Catechism, but I was not 
taught it as something I must believe, and I soon 
learned that they who taught it to me did not them- 
selves believe it. True, also, I was taught the 
Apostles' Creed, but I was not required to believe it, 
and received no instructions as to its sense. I pro- 
bably did believe, however, the greater part of it. 
I believed in God the Father Almighty ; that Jesus 
Christ was his only begotten Son; that he was 
conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin 



8 THE CONVERT. 

Mary, was crucified by the wicked Jews, under 
Pontius Pilate, was dead, and buried ; that he rose 
again from the dead on the third day ; that he as- 
cended into heaven ; that he sitteth at the right 
hand of the Father Ahnighty, whence he shall come 
to judge the quick and the dead. I believed in the 
Holy Ghost ; the forgiveness of sins for Christ's 
sake ; the resurrection of the body, and the life 
everlasting. But to the articles of the creed affirm- 
ing the Holy Catholic Church, and the Communion 
of Saints, I attached no meaning ; my attention was 
not called to them ; and not till long years after, did 
it occur to me to ask whether they meant any thing 
or nothing. 

There is no doubt that I was weU disposed to 
believe, and that if I had been properly instructed 
in the Christian faith I should have heartily received 
it, and held as fast to it as an unbaptized person, as 
one who is only a catechumen can do ; but as it was, 
I attached very little definite meaning to what I was 
taught, and was open to any kind of infiuences by 
which I was surrounded. Nobody, however, told me 
that baptism was necessary ; and nobody told me 



CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. y 

any thing about the Cliurch. The most I was told 
was that I must ^^get religion/' "experience reli- 
gion/' have " a change of heart/' " be born again ; " 
but how that was to be brought about I could not 
understand. I took it for granted that I had not 
experienced religion^ and I really wished I might be 
born again ; but how I could be born again, or what 
I was to do in order to be born again, nobody ex- 
plained to my understanding. 

In the town in which I lived we had Congrega- 
tionalists, called in my young days, " The Standing 
Order/' Methodists, Baptists, Universalists, and 
Christians, or, as they insisted on the word being 
pronounced, Christ-yans. The Congregational meet- 
ing-house was four miles distant from our house, in 
the middle of the town, and we never attended it. 
The Methodists and Christians, a sect founded in 
New England by one Elias Smith, and one Abner 
Jones, in the year 1800, if I mistake not — held 
their meetings near by us, sometimes in a school- 
house, sometimes in private houses ; and in the 
summer season, not unfrequently in a very pleasant 

grove. The Universalists were few, and so were the 
1* 



10 THE CONVERT, 

Baptists. The Methodists and Christians were the 
more numerous. I usually attended their meetings. 
They differed I was told ; but the only difference I 
could discover between them was that the Methodist 
preachers appeared to have the stronger lungs ; they 
preached in a louder tone, and when they preached 
the people shouted more. I thought them the best, 
because they made the most noise, and gave the most 
vivid pictures of hell-fire, and the tortures of the 
damned. All I learned, however, from either was, 
that I must be bom again or go to hell, get religion 
or be damned. The more I listened to them the 
more I feared hell, and the less I loved God. Love 
gave place to terror ; and I became constantly afraid 
that the devil would come and carry me off bodily. 
I tried to get religion, and at times almost made up 
my mind to submit to the Methodists, and let them 
" bring me out.'' 

One of our neighbors, an elderly woman, who 
had seen better days, had been well brought up, and 
well educated, was a Congregationalist, a stanch ad- 
herent to the Standing Order. She was now very 
poor, and lived in a miserable log-hut on one corner 



CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 11 

of our farm, and was treated generally by our neigh- 
bors with great contempt, because she insisted on 
maintaining her self-respect and personal dignity, 
notwithstanding her poverty. I had a great affection 
for her, because I found her a woman of intelligence 
and refinement. I visited her one evening, when I 
was in great distress of mind, and told her my fears 
and my resolutions. She heard me with great pa- 
tience, till I had concluded my story. 

" My poor boy,'' she replied, ^^ God has been good 
to you, and has no doubt gracious designs towards 
you. He means to use you for a purpose of his own, 
and you must be faithful to his inspirations. But 
go not with the Methodists or with any of the sects. 
They are New Lights, and not to be trusted. The 
Christian religion is not new, and Christians have ex- 
isted from the time of Christ. These New Lights are 
of yesterday. You yourself know the founder of the 
Christian sect, and I myself knew personally both 
George Whitfield and John Wesley, the founders 
of Methodism. Neither can be right, for they come 
too late, and have broken off, separated from the body 
of Christians, which subsisted before them. When 



12 THE CONVERT. 

you join any body calling itself a Christian body^ find 
out and join one that began with Christ and his 
ApostleS; and has continued to subsist the same with- 
out change of doctrine or worship down to our own 
times. You will find the true religion with that 
body, and nowhere else. Join it, obey it, and you 
will find rest and salvation. But beware of sects and 
New Lights, they will make you fair promises, but in 
the end will deceive you to your own destruction.'' 

I was some twelve years old at the time, but the 
words made a deep impression upon my mind. They 
struck me as reasonable and just, and I think they pre- 
vented me from ever being a genuine, hearty Protes- 
tant, or a thorough-going radical even. She was not a 
Catholic, but her argument is one which, though I knew 
it not then, none save a Catholic can consistently urge. 
She was sincerely a Congregationalist, and held only 
the views which in my boyhood were generally insisted 
on by the old Standing Order of New England. How- 
ever erroneous were the views of the New England 
Puritans, they retained a conception of the Church of 
Christ, held that Christ had himself founded a Church, 
established its order, and given it its ordinances, and 



CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 13 

taught that it was necessary to belong to it in order 
to be saved. The loose notions of the Church, the 
humanism and transcendentalism, now so common 
among their descendants, were then unknown. They 
were as rigid and as consistent churchmen in their 
way as the Anglicans, and even more so. 

But time went on, and after I was fourteen years 
of age, I was thrown upon a new world, into the 
midst of new and strange scenes, and exposed to 
new and corrupting influences. I fell in with new 
sectaries, universalists, deists, atheists, and nothing- 
arians, as they are called with us, who profess no par- 
ticular religion. I still held fast to the belief in my 
need of religion, and there were times when my earher 
feelings revived, and I enjoyed my silent medita- 
tions. But my young head became confused with 
the contradictory opinions I heard advanced, with the 
doubts and denials to which I listened, and for a 
time my mind was darkened, and I half persuaded 
myself that all religion was a delusion, — the work of 
priestcraft or statecraft. I was in a labyrinth of 
doubt, with no Ariadne's thread to guide me out to 
the light of day. I was miserable, and knew not 



14 THE CONVERT. 

where to turn for relief. I felt that my own reason 
was insufficient to guide me, and the more I at- 
tempted by it alone to arrive at truth, the farther I 
went astray, and the more uncertain and perplexed I 
became. 

One day, when I was about nineteen years of age, 
I^was passing by a Presbyterian meeting-house. It 
was Sunday, and the people were gathering for the 
service. The thought struck me that I would go in 
and join with them. It was a beautiful Septem- 
ber day, in Malta, Saratoga County, New York. 
The air was soft and balmy, the sky was clear and 
serene, and it seemed as if all nature was enjoying its 
sweet Sabbath-day repose. I went into the meeting- 
house ; it was long since I had been in a place of 
worship. The singing was perhaps not very good, 
but it soothed me, while it affected me even to tears. 
I listened reverently to the reading of the Scriptures, 
to the prayer, and to the sermon. There was nothing 
in the sermon that I remember. It was a common- 
place affair. But I went out from that meeting- 
house much affected, and feeUng that I had missed 
my way. As I pursued my journey, I could not 



CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 15 

help asking myself what I had gained by my specu- 
lations, and why it was that I must have no sympa- 
thy with my kind ? why I must stand alone, and 
find no belief to sustain me, and have no worship to 
refresh me ? 

I have, said I, in my self-communing, done my 
best to find the truth, to experience religion, and 
to lead a religious life, yet here I am without faith, 
without hope, without love. I know not what to be- 
lieve. I know not what to do. I know not whence 
I came, why I am here, or whither I go. My. life is 
a stream that fiows out of darkness into darkness. 
The world is dark to me, and not a ray of light even 
for one instant relieves it. My heart is sad, and I 
see nothing to hope for, or to live for. For me Heaven 
is dispeopled, and the Earth is a desert, a barren 
waste. Why is this so ? Why does my heart re- 
bel against the speculations of my mind ? If doubt 
is all there is for me, why cannot I discipline my 
feelings into submission to it ? Why this craving to 
believe, when there is nothing to be believed ? Why 
this longing for sympathy, when there is nothing to 
respond to my heart ? Why this thirst for an un- 



16 THE CONVERT. 

bounded good^ when there is no good, when all is a 
mere show, an illusion, and nothing is real ? Have 
I not mistaken my way ? 

Was I not told in the outset that if I followed 
my own reason, it would lead me astray, that I 
should lose all belief, and find myself involved in 
universal doubt and uncertainty ? Has it not been 
so ? In attempting to follow the light of reason 
alone have I not lost faith, lost the light of revela- 
tion, and plunged myself into spiritual darkness ? I 
did not believe what these people said, and yet 
were they not right ? They were. They told me 
to submit my reason to revelation. I will do so. I 
am incapable of directing myself I must have a 
guide. I will hear the Church. I will surrender, 
abnegate my own reason, which hitherto has only led 
me astray, and make myself a member of the Church, 
and do what she commands me. 

In a few days I told my experience to the Pres- 
byterian minister of the town where I was pursuing 
my academic studies, went the same day, at his re- 
quest, and told it to the Session of his church, and 
the Sunday following was baptized and received into 



CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 17 

the Presbyterian communion. I did not ask wlietlier 
the Presbyterian church was the true Church or 
not^ for the Church question had not yet been fairly 
raised in my mind, and as it did not differ essentially 
from the Standing Order, and claimed to be the true 
Church, and was counted respectable, I was satisfied. 
What it believed was of little consequence, since I 
had resolved to abnegate my own reason, and take the 
Church for my guide. My proceeding was precipitate, 
but after all was not rash, for it was logical, and jus- 
tified by the resolution I had taken. So in October, 
1822, 1 became a member of the Presbyterian church, 
Ballston, Saratoga County, New York. 



CHAPTEE II. 

PRESBYTERIAN EXPERIENCE. 

The Monday following my reception into the Pres- 
byterian communion we had a covenant meeting, or 
a meeting of all the members of the church. The 
Presbyterians, like most of the Protestant sects in 
this country, adopt the doctrine of the old Donatists, 
that the Church is composed of the elect, the just, or 
the [saints only, and they therefore distinguish be- 
tween the church and the congregation, or between 
those who are held to be saints, and those held to be 
sinners, that is, between those who profess to have 
been regenerated, and those who make no such pre- 
tension, although they may have been baptized. The 
church members, to the number of about six hun- 
dred, came together on Monday, and after being ad- 
dressed by the pastor, and stirred up to greater 



PRESBYTERIAN EXPERIENCE. 19 

zeal for the promotion of Presbyterianism, renewed 
their covenant obligations, and bound themselves to 
greater efforts for the conversion of sinners, the com- 
mon name given to all not of the sect, even though 
members of the congregation, and born of Presby- 
terian parents. In this meeting we all solemnly 
pledged ourselves, not only to pray for the conversion 
of sinners, but to mark them wherever we met them, 
to avoid them, to have no intercourse with them that 
could be helped, and never to speak to them except 
to admonish them of their sins, or so far as it should 
be necessary on business. There was to be no inter- 
change of social or neighborly visits between us and 
them, and we were to have even business relations 
with them only when absolutely necessary. We were 
by our manner to show all not members of the Pres- 
byterian church that we regarded them as the ene- 
mies of God, and therefore as our enemies, as persons 
hated by God, and therefore hated by us ; and we 
were even in business relations always to give the 
preference to church members, and as far as pos- 
sible, without sacrificing our own interests, to treat 
those not members as outcasts from society, as pa- 



20 THE CONVERT. 

riahs, and thus by appeals to their business interests^ 
their social feelings, and their desire to stand well in 
the community, to compel them to join the Presby- 
terian church. The meeting was animated by a sin- 
gular mixture of bigotry, uncharitableness, apparent 
zeal for God's glory, and a shrewd regard to the in- 
terests of this world. 

About the time I speak of, and for several years 
after, meetings of the sort I have described, were 
common in the Presbyterian churches, and a move- 
ment was made, in 1827, to induce all the mem- 
bers throughout the Union to pledge themselves to 
non-intercourse with the rest of the community, 
except for their conversion, and to refuse in the 
common business affairs of life to patronize any one 
not a member of the church. How far it succeeded 
I am not informed ; but as, taking the country at 
large, the Presbyterians were but a small minority, 
and by no means able to control its business opera- 
tions, I suppose it was only partially successful, and 
its abettors had to soften their rules a little so as to 
bring within the privileged the members of the other 
Evangelical sects. 



PRESBYTERIAN EXPERIENCE. 21 

It may readily be believed that the exliibitioii I 
saw was not over and above pleasing to me, and that 
it was only with a wry face that I took the pledges 
with the rest. I was in for it, and» I would do as 
the others did. I saw at once that I had made a mis- 
take, that I had no sympathy with the Presbyterian 
spirit, and should need a long and severe training to 
sour and elongate my visage sufficiently to enjoy the 
full confidence of my new brethren. Every day's 
experience proved it. In our covenant we had bound 
ourselves to watch over one another with fraternal 
affection. I was not long in discovering that this 
meant that we were each to be a spy upon the 
others, and to rebuke, admonish, or report them to 
the Session. My whole life became constrained. I 
dared not trust myself, in the presence of a church 
member, to a single spontaneous emotion ; I dared 
not speak in my natural tone of voice, and if I smiled 
I expected to be reported. The system of espionage 
in some European countries is bad enough, and it is 
no pleasant reflection that the man you are talking 
with may be a mouchardy and report your words to 
the Prefet de Police ; but that is nothing to what 



22 THE CONVERT. 

one must endure as a Presbyterian, unless he has 
enough of malignity to find an indemnification for 
being spied in spying others. We were allowed no 
liberty, and dared enjoy ourselves only by stealth. 
The most rigid Catholic ascetic never imagined a 
disciphne a thousandth part as rigid as the discipline 
to which I was subjected. The slightest deviation 
was a mortal sin, the slightest forgetfulness was 
enough to send me to hell. I must not talk with 
sinners ; I must take no pleasure in social inter- 
course with persons, however moral, amiable, well- 
bred, or worthy, if not members of the church ; I 
was forbidden to read books written by others than 
Presbyterians, and commanded never to inquire into 
my belief as a Presbyterian, or to reason on it, or 
about it. 

I tried for a year or two to stifle my discontent, 
to silence my reason, to repress my natural emotions, 
to extinguish my natural affections, and to submit 
patiently to the Calvinistic discipline. I spent much 
time in prayer and meditation, I read pious books, 
and finally plunged myself into my studies with a 
view of becoming a Presbyterian minister. But it 



PRESBYTERIAN EXPERIENCE. 23 

would not do. I had joined the church because I had 
despaired of myself, and because despairing of reason 
I had wished to submit to authority. If the Presby- 
terian church had satisfied me that she had authori- 
ty, was authorized by Almighty God to teach and 
direct me, I could have continued to submit ; but 
while she exercised the most rigid authority over me, 
she disclaimed all authority to teach me, and remit- 
ted me to the Scriptures and private judgment. 
^' We do not ask you to take this as your creed,'" 
said my pastor, on giving me a copy of the Presby- 
terian Confession of Faith ; ^^ we do not give you this 
as a summary of the doctrines you must hold, but as 
an excellent summary of the doctrines which we be- 
lieve the Scriptures teach. What you are tobeUeve 
is the Bible. You must take the Bible as your 
creed, and read it with a prayerful mind, begging 
the Holy Ghost to aid you to understand it aright." 
But while the church refused to take the responsi- 
bility of telling me what doctrines I must believe, 
while she sent me to the Bible and private judgment, 
she yet claimed authority to condemn and excom- 



24 THE CONVERT. 

municate me as a heretic^ if I departed from tlie 
standard of doctrine contained in her Confession. 

This I regarded as unfair treatment. It subject- 
ed me to all the disadvantages of authority without 
any of its advantages. The church demanded that 
I should treat her as a true mother, while she was 
free to treat me only as a step-son, or even as a 
stranger. Be one thing or another, said I ; either as- 
sume the authority and the responsibiKty of teaching 
and directing me, or leave me with the responsibility 
my freedom. If you have authority from God, avow 
it, and exercise it. I am all submission. I will hold 
what you say, and do what you bid. If you have 
not, then say so, and forbear to call me to an account 
for differing from you, or disregarding your teachings. 
Either bind me or loose me. Do not mock me with 
a freedom which is no freedom, or with an authority 
which is illusory. If you claim authority over my 
faith, tell me what I must believe, and do not throw 
upon me the labor and responsibility of forming a 
creed for myself ; if you do not, if you send me to 
the Bible and private judgment, to find out the 
Christian faith the best way I can, do not hold me 



PRESBYTERIAN EXPERIENCE. 25 

obliged to conform to your standards, or assume the 
right to anathematize me for departing from them. 

My position was a painful one, and I could not 
endure it. I had gained nothing, but lost much, by 
joining the Presbyterian church. I had given up 
the free exercise of my own reason for the sake of an 
authoritative teacher, and had obtained no such 
teacher. I had despaired of finding the truth by my 
own reason, and had now nothing better, nor so good, 
because I could not now exercise it freely. Certainly 
I had been too hasty, and reckoned without my host. 
After all, what reason had I to regard this Presbyte- 
rian church as the true Church of Christ ? " Go not 
after the New Lights,'' said my old Congregational- 
ist friend. Are not these Presbyterians New Lights, 
as much as the Methodists and the Christians ? If 
our Lord founded a Church and has a Church on 
earth, it must reach back to his time, and come 
down in unbroken succession from the Apostles. 
But the Presbyterian church is a recently formed 
body, not three hundred years old. It was founded 
in Scotland by men who had been Eoman Catholics, 
and who had deserted the faith in which they had 



26 THE CONVERT. 

been reared ; and in England by men who had be- 
longed to tbe cliurcli of England, which itself had 
broken off from the Catholic Church. Were these 
men authorized by an express commission from God.^ 
Did they act by authority ? or did they follow their 
own private judgment^ and against the authority 
which they had previously recognized ? The latter 
certainly. Then what reason have I for regarding 
the church they founded as the Church of Christ ? 

I was answered that the Church of Christ had 
become corrupt, and been for a long series of ages 
perverted to a papistical and prelatical Church, and 
these men were reformers, and simply labored to re- 
store the Church to its primitive purity and simplici- 
ty. But had they a warrant from Christ to do that. ^ 
Or did they act on their own responsibility, without 
warrant ? If you say the former, where is the 
proof ? If the latter, how can their acts bind me ? 
Am not I a man, and as a man have I not as much 
right to follow my private opinion as they had to 
follow theirs? But they followed the Bible. Be it 
so. But was it the Bible as they understood it, or 
as it was understood by their Catholic predecessors 



PKESBYTERIAN EXPERIENCE. 27 

and contemporaries ? — You forget, the Catholic 
Church rejected the Bible, and did not follow it at 
all. — Yet she preserved the Bible and taught that it 
was given by inspiration of God, and it was from her 
that the Eeformers got it. She did not own that 
she rejected the Scriptures, or that she taught, or 
allowed any thing to be taught, inconsistent with 
them. How know I that her understanding of the 
Bible was not as good as the understanding of it by 
the Eeformers ? They thought differently from her, 
but were they infallible ? If they had a right to 
break from her and set up their private understand- 
ing of Scripture, why have I not the right to break 
from them, and from the Presbyterian church, follow 
my private understanding, and set up a church of 
my own ? 

It was clear to me that the Presbyterian church, 
though the church of one class of the Eeformers, was 
not and could not be the Church of Christ, and there- 
fore it could have no legitimate authority over me. 
If Christ had a church on earth which he had found- 
ed, and which had authority to teach in his name, it 
was evidently the Eoman Catholic Church. But 



28 THE CONVERT. 

that Churchy of course, was out of the question. It 
was every thing that was vile, base, odious, and de- 
moralizing. It > had been condemned by the judg- 
ment of mankind, and the thought of becoming a 
Koman Catholic found and could find at that time 
no entrance into my mind. I should sooner liave 
thought of turning Jew, Mahometan, Gentoo, or 
Buddhist. What then was I to do ? There was no 
alternative. It was the Catholic Church or no 
Church. All the so-called Protestant churches were 
New Lights, were of yesterday, founded by fallible 
men, without any warrant from God^ without any 
authority but their private interpretation of Scrip- 
ture. I cannot accept any one of them as having 
any authority to teach or direct me. Being the 
work of men, honest men, learned men, pious men, 
if you will, they have no authority over my con- 
science, and no right to hold me amenable to them. 
Then, since I cannot be a Catholic, I must be a no- 
church man, and deny all churches, make war upon 
every sect claiming the slightest authority in mat- 
ters of faith or conscience. 

I was at tliis time about twenty-one years of 



PRESBYTERIAN EXPERIENCE. 29 

age. The question with me was not what but whom 
I was to believe ; not what doctrines I must em- 
brace^ but what authority I was to obey, or on what 
authority I was to take my behef. As to particular 
doctrines, they did not trouble me. I paid very 
little attention to them. I regarded them of minor 
consideration, and never entered very deeply into 
their investigation. The important thing with me 
from the first was to find out the rule of faith. I 
had not found it in my youthful and uninformed 
reason, and had submitted to the Presbyterian 
church, hoping to find it in her authority. I failed 
to find it there, and, the Catholic Church being out 
of the question, I was forced by the necessity of the 
case to fall back on the Scriptures interpreted by my 
own private judgment for myself. 

In becoming a Presbyterian on the ground I did, 
I committed a mistake, and placed myself in a false 
position, which it took me years to rectify. It was 
a capital blunder. Not that I was insincere, or 
governed by bad motives, but because, feeling the 
insufficiency of my own reason to guide me, I turned 
my back on reason, and took up with what I sup- 



30 TEtE CONVERT. 

posed to be autliority without a rational motive fqr 
believing it divinely commissioned. As far as I 
could, I abnegated my own rational nature, denied 
reason to malie way for revelation, rational conviction 
to iriake way for authority. Unhappily, the religious 
belief of my Protestant countrymen, as far as religious 
belief they have, is built on skepticism, and hence if 
they think at all, they have a perpetual struggle in 
their minds between faith and reason. The two are 
presented, not each as the other's complement, but as 
antagonistical, the one to advance only over the dead 
body of the other. All those with whom I came into 
relation, either denied reason, to make way for revela- 
tion, or revelation to make way for reason. At least 
such was their tendency. The one class declaimed 
against reason, used reason against reason, and some- 
times assigned^ apparently, a very good reason why 
reason ought not to be used. The other class, either 
openly denied all supernatural revelation, or admit- 
ting it in words, explained away all its supernatural- 
ness, and brought it within the sphere of the natural 
order, and subjected it to the dominion of natural 
reason. 



PRESBYTERIAN EXPERIENCE. 31 

This was the natural result of Calvinism, which 
was the dominant doctrine of the American peo- 
ple ; and, so far as they have any notions of 
Christianity at all as a revealed religion^ the great 
majority of them, whether they accept or reject it, 
are even yet Calvinists. They appreheud Chris-* 
tianity always through Calvinistic spectacles, and 
under Calvinistic forms. The fundamental doctrine 
of Calvinism is that man by the Fall lost his natu- 
ral spiritual faculties, and became totally depraved, 
incapable by nature of any thing but sin. Grace is 
conceived therefore as opposed to nature, and revela- 
tion as opposed to reason. A nature that is totally 
depraved cannot be redeemed, but must be sup- 
planted or superseded by grace ; a totally depraved 
reason is incapable of a rational act, and therefore 
revelation cannot be addressed to it to supply its 
weakness, or to place it in relation with truth lying 
in an order above its natural reach, but, if con- 
ceived at all, must be conceived as a substitute for 
reason, as discarding reason and taking its place. 
Hence it is my countrymen, receiving their first 
notions of Christianity through Calvinism, are never 



32 THE CONVERT. 

able to reconcile faith and reason, or to harmonize 
nature and grace. They feel, — against the dictates 
of common sense, — that they must either deny the 
one or the other. Some try to assert both, but 
find that their life is one of painful struggle precise- 
ly where peace and repose are promised by the 
Gospel. 

In general, those Protestants commonly called 
Orthodox, when they are sincere and earnest, when 
their religion is not put on or retained for a sinister 
purpose, retain their belief only by refusing to ex- 
amine its grounds. The eminent Dr. Payson, one 
of the most distinguished Calvinistic ministers of 
New England in the first half of the present cen- 
tury, records in his diary his temptations to doubt 
even the Divine existence, and says that the devil 
suggested to him arguments against the existence 
of God, which, if published, would shake the faith 
of more than one half of Christendom. I cite from 
memory, but believe his expression was much stronger. 
My own Presbyterian pastor told me, time and 
again, not to allow myself to read any book touching 
the grounds of my belief as a Presbyterian, or even 



PRESBYTERIAN EXPERIENCE. 33 

to think on the subject. Large numbers of Calvin- 
istSj in their confidential intercourse with me, have 
assured me that the only way in which they could 
retain their faith, their belief even in revelation, 
was by refusing even in their own minds to reason 
on the subject. Their belief, as far as belief they 
have, is and must be a blind belief, an effort of the 
will alone, without any assent of the understanding ; 
for they start with the assumption that reason is 
totally depraved, and therefore a false light, a de- 
ceptive guide. The gravest objection to Calvinism 
is its denunciation of reason, and its attempt to 
build up a system of theology on revelation made to 
an irrational subject. 

God gave me reason, I said, in my self-commun- 
ings. It is my distinguishing faculty, and to abne- 
gate it is to surrender my essential character as a 
man, and to sink myself, theoretically, to the level of , 
the brute creation. Eevelation, if revelation there 
be, must be made to me as a man, as a rational sub- 
ject. Take away my reason, and you can as well 
make a revelation to an ox or a horse, a pig or an 
ass, as to me. It demands reason to receive revela- "j 



34 THE CONVERT. 

^^tion^ and the natural to receive the supernatural. 
If there is no natural there can be no supernatural. 
\ If I am totally depraved^ I am incapable of being 
redeemed ; and if my reason is deceptive, and never 
/ to be trusted, how am I to know that what I take 
' to be revelation is revelation ? It is God's word, 
you say, and God cannot lie. But how am I to 
know that it is God's word, or that there is any 
God at all, if my reason is totally depraved, and to 
be discarded as a false light ? No, no, it will not 
do. We cannot build faith on skepticism ; and just 
in proportion as we discredit reason, we must dis- 
credit revelation. Keason must at least be the pre- 
amble to faith, and nature must precede and be pre- 
supposed by grace. 

I must then, I continued, revoke the act of sur- 
render, which I made of my reason to authority on 
entering the Presbyterian church ; for it was an ir- 
rational, an unmanly act. I offered in it no reason- 
able obedience or submission to God. It was a blind 
submission, and really no submission of my reason 
at all. It was a cowardly act, the act of an in- 
tellectual desperado, although the motive was good. 



I^RESBYTEHIAN EXPERIENCE. 35 

I reclaim my reason, I reclaim my manhood, and 
henceforth I will, let come what may, be true to 
my reason, and preserve the rights and dignity of i 
my human nature. This resolution, of course, sep- ! 
arated me from Presbyterianism. The peculiar 
Presbyterian doctrines I had never believed or pro- 
fessed to believe, except on the authority of the 
Presbyterian church. Grrant her authority from 
God to teach, I was logician enough to understand 
that I must believe whatever she taught, whether I 
Gould or could not reconcile it with my own reason. 
That authority taken away, then I was not bound 
to believe her doctrines, unless I found reasons for 
so doing elsewhere. 

The doctrine of unconditional election and re- 
probation, and the doctrine that God foreordains the 
wicked to sin necessarily, that he may damn them 
justly, I found difficult to swallow, and still more 
difficult to digest. My honest pastor told me that 
he regarded the doctrine as a hard doctrine, as re- 
volting to human nature, and he had tried inr- 
the General Assembly of the Presbyterian church, - 
in 1821, to get it modified, or rescinded altogether, - 



36 THE CONVERT. 

but failed by one or two votes. The doctrine was 
repugnant to my reason, and having settled it, that 
revelation could never contain any thing repugnant 

^ to reason, I rejected it without taking the trouble 
to inquire whether it was Scriptural or not. It is 
unreasonable, it is unjust, and therefore cannot be 

I taught in the Scriptures, if they are written by 
Divine inspiration. When a Presbyterian I simply 
asked, what does the Presbyterian church teach? 
But having discovered that the Presbyterian church 
was a self-created body, and without any authority 
from God, and having adopted reason as my test or 
criterion of truth, I asked simply, What is or is not 
contrary to reason ? 

I felt, as every thinking man feels and always 
must feel, that reason is insufficient, and that with 
no other guide it is impossible to attain to all truth, 
or always to avoid all error ; but it was the best 
guide I had, and all I could do was to exercise it 
freely and honestly upon all subjects, — to give it 
fair play, and abide the result. I did not absolutely 
reject the Scriptures, nor absolutely accept them. 
As the word of God they were infallible ; but they 



PRESBYTERIAN EXPERIENCE. 37 

were and could be the word of God only in the 
sense intended by the Holy Ghost, and that sense I 
had no infallible means of ascertaining. I could 
not^ then, feel myself bound by the strict letter of 
the Scriptures, and felt that I had a right to inter- 
pret them by my own understanding, and to explain 
them in accordance with the dictates of natural 
reason. I consequently, without rejecting them, 
attenuated their practical authority, and made rea- 
son a rule for them, instead of taking them, as 
the believer must, as a rule for reason. I thus 
passed from so-called Orthodox Christianity to what 
is sometimes denominated Liberal Christianity. This 
was my first notable change, — a change from a Su- 
pernaturalist to a Rationalist. In fact, it should 
not be regarded so much as a change as the com- 
mencement of my intellectual life, for I was as yet 
only twenty-one years of age. 



CHAPTEE IIL 

BECOME A UNIVERSALIST* 

I DID not leave Presbyterianism because I had found 
another church or another system of doctrine per- 
fectly satisfactory to my reason- — one by which I felt 
I could be willing to live and die. I rejected Pres- 
"byterianism because I had no good reason for holding 
it, and because it could not meet the want I felt of 
an authoritative teacher. It did not even claim to 
be infallible, conceded that it might err, and could not 
give any proof that it had been instituted by Christ 
and his Apostles, or that its founders acted under a 
divine commission. These were sufficient reasons for 
not continuing a Presbyterian, but not for embracing 
any other particular sect. Where then was I to go? 
What was I to believe ? 

I was unwilling to be an unbeliever, and felt 



BECOME A UNIVERSALIST. 39 

deeply the need of having a religion of some sort. 
What should it be ? Liberal Christianity was a 
vague term^ and presented nothing definite or posi- 
tive. Its chief characteristic was the denial of what 
was called Orthodoxy, and taking nature and reason 
for the rule of faith. The only definite form under 
which I was acquainted with it was that of Univer- 
sahsm, then far less generally diffused than it is now. 
Prior to becoming a Presbyterian I had read several 
Universalist books, and been initiated into the mys- 
teries of Universalism by a sister of my mother, who 
had in her youth listened to the preaching of Dr. 
Elhanan Winchester, one of the earliest Universalist 
preachers in America. Dr. Winchester had been a 
Calvinistic Baptist minister, and had while a Bap- 
tist acquired considerable reputation as a zealous, fer- 
vent, and eloquent preacher — a reputation which re- 
called and almost rivalled that of the famous George 
Whitfield, one of the original Oxford Methodists. 
He preached in various parts of the United States 
and Grreat Britain, and stood very high with his sect. 
At the very height of his success as a Baptist, he 
began to doubt the doctrine of endless punishment. 



'40 THE CONVEBT. 

Inquiry led him to reject it, and to embrace the doc- 
trine of the final salvation or restoration of all men, 
and even of the fallen angels, thus reviving the doc- 

trine said to have been held by Origen in the third 

I - 

century, though probably so said without sufficient 
warrant. He preached and wrote my.ch in defence 
of his favorite tenet, and, though preceded by that 
eccentric Irishman, John Murray, the first who 
avowedly preached universal salvation in the United 
States, he may be justly regarded as< the founder of 
American Universalism. He had some pretensions 
to learning, but no philosophy, and very Kttle theo- 
logical science* He wrote several works in defence 
of Universal Eestoration, among which his Dialogues^ - 
his Lectures on the Prophecies^ borrowed in great 
part from a work on the same subject by Dr. Thomas 
Newton, an Anglican Divine, I believe, and an Epic 
Poem, celebrating the Triumph of the Empire of 
Christ, were the more noticeable. I forget the exact 
title of the poem, but I remember that the author 
tells us in the preface that it was written in the course 
of three months during his leisure moments, although 
it makes a good-sized duodecimo volume in close 



BECOME A UNIVERSAMST. 41 

print, and that if he had devoted all his time to it he 
could have Written it in a much briefer period. I 
recollect nothing in the poem ^o throw any doubt on 
this statement. The poem certainly was not equal 
to the Iliad, Paradise Lost, or the Dtvina Commedia, 
and not much superior to the Fredoniad or the 
Napolead, — two of our many American Epics known, 
I fear, to very few American readers. 

My aunt had placed these works in my hands 
when I was between fourteen and fifteen years of 
age, and aided by her brilliant and enthusiastic com- 
nentaries, they had shaken my early belief in future 
rewards and punishments, and unsettled my mind on 
the most important points of Christian faith. Be- 
sides the works 'of Mr. Winchester, I had also read a 
work on Universal Salvation,'' by Dr. Chauncy, a 
learned and highly esteemed Congregationalist min- 
ister in the last century, in Boston, Massachusetts. 
Dr. Chauncy was the son of President Chauncy of 
Harvard College, and was born in Boston, January 
1, 1705. He was ordained pastor of the First Con- 
gregational church in Boston, the church in Chaun- 
cy Place, 1727, and continued to be its pastor till 



42 THE CONVEM. 

liis death, February 10, 1787, in the 83d year of his 
age. He was strongly attached to the American 
cause in the struggle of the Colonies with the mother 
country, and rendered it important services. He 
was vehemently opposed to George Whitfield, the 
New Lights, and the religious enthusiasm which 
Whitfield's preaching excited, as also to Episcopacy, 
which he could in no manner tolerate. George Whit- 
field was an Englishman, a student of Oxford, and a 
presbyter of the Anglican Church. He was one of 
the original Methodists, and associated with John 
Wesley, from whom he subsequently separated on the 
question of unconditional election and reprobation. 
He visited the Colonies several times, and finally died 
and was buried in Newburyport, Massachusetts. In 
one of his numerous visits to this country. Dr. Chaun- 
cy met him as he was landing on the wharf in Bos- 
ton, and taking him by the hand, said : ^^ Mr. Whit- 
field, I am sorry you have come to this coun- 
try. I am sorry to see you here.'' " No doubt of 
it," replied the missionary, " and so is the devil." 
The edition of Dr. Chauncy's book which I read was 
a moderate sized octavo, printed in London, without 



BECOME A UNIVERSALIST. 43 

the author's name, and I am not aware that it has 
ever been reprinted in this country. I do not recol- 
lect the work very distinctly, nor the precise ground 
on which the author defends the final salvation of 
all men ; but my impression is that he urges it from 
the universality of the atonement, and the nature of 
punishment, which he holds is purgative or reforma- 
tory, not vindictive. The book was marked by a 
show of learning and some ability, but I thought it 
rather dull and heavily written. 

About the same time I read another work, called 
Calvinism Improved^ written by Dr. Joseph Hunt- 
ington, pastor of the Congregational Church in Cov- 
entry, Connecticut. Dr. Huntington lived in the 
last century, and was of the same family with the 
Hon. Samuel Huntington, one of the signers of the 
Declaration of American Independence. His book 
was not published till after his death, and I am not 
aware that he was ever suspected during his life- 
time of holding the doctrine of Universal Salvation. 
The work has not much method, but is written in a 
free, easy, flowing, and attractive style. The author 
starts with the Calvinistic premises of imputed right- 



44 THE CONVERT. 

eoiisness and salvation by grace without works, and 
concludes the salvation of all men. He supposes two 
covenants, the covenant of works made by Almighty 
God with Adam as federal head of mankind in the 
natural order/ and the covenant of grace, made by the 

; Father with the Son, the Federal Head of the hu- 

j 

': man race in the spiritual order. The first covenant 
failed, and all mankind fell under the wrath of God, 
died in Adam, and were condemned to everlasting 
death ; but the Son, becoming incarnate, fulfilled 
the covenant of works for men, expiated the guilt in- 
curred by the human race, and under the covenant 
of grace redeems, restores, and saves them. Works 
have nothing to do with salvation, which is a work 
of pure grace. Under the covenant of works no man 
. can be saved, and if works entered into the covenant 
ht grace it would no longer be a covenant of grace^ 
The sinner is saved by the covenant of grace alone, 
not in consideration of any good thing in him or done 
by him. He is saved solely by the free sovereign act 
of God imputing to him, or counting as his, the 
righteousness of Christ. This doctrine which Cal- 
vinism asserts, but confines to the elect only, Dr. 



BECOME A UNIVERSALIST. 45 

Huntington extends to all men. He proves from 

the Scriptures that the atonement was made for all 

men, and was an ample and abundant satisfaction 

for the sins of the whole world. Hence all men must 

be included in the covenant of grace, not a few only, 

and Christ must be regarded as the head of every 

man. In this covenant of grace God agrees to reckon i 

the sins of all men as the sins of Christ, and to im- 

i 
pute the righteousness of Christ to all who have | 

transgressed. He transfers the sins to Christ, and 

punishes them in him, and then finding his justice 

satisfied, pardons the sinner, transfers to him the _ 

righteousness of Christ, counts him just for Christ's 

sake, and receives him to his peace and love. — 

In the day of judgment, men will first be judged 

by the covenant of works, under which all will be 

condemned, for all have failed to keep that covenant, 

and the Judge, speaking in the name of the law of 

works, shall say to all the human family, ^^ Depart 

from me ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for 

the devil and his angels.'' They shall then be c 

judged under the covenant of grace, and the Judge, 

in consideration of the fact that the penalty incurred 



46 THE CONVEET. 

by the breach of the covenant of works has been 
borne and fully expiated by Christ in his own person^ 
shall say, speaking in the name of free grace, '' Come 
ye blessed of my Father, enter into the kingdom of 
heaven, prepared for you from the foundation of the 
world/^ Thus the law is justified by the innocent 
suffering for the guilty, has its full and perfect vindi- 
cation, and yet all men are saved, — yet, I might add, 
^without personal sanctity, — a point in the author's es- 
timation of no great importance. The good Doctor 
does not shrink from making God the author of all 
our actions whether good or bad, and to the objection 
that sin is of a personal nature and its guilt is not 
transferable, he replies, that sin is no more personal 
than justice, and that it is as easy for God to trans- 
fer our sins to Christ as it is for him to transfer 
Christ's righteousness to us. Sin is, he says, God's 
property, God has the sovereign dominion over it, 
and may do with it what seems to him good, and 
transfer it to whom he pleases. 

A neighbor put into my hands also a Treatise on 
the Atonement by Hosea Ballon. Mr. Ballon was 
a native of New Hampshire, originally a Calvinistic 



BECOME A UNIVERSALIST. 47 

Baptist, but he became a Universalist througb the 
influence of some members of his familj^, who had 
been converted directly or indirectly by the preach- 
ing and writings of Dr. Elhanan Winchester. He 
was, I think, of French descent, the son of a small 
New England farmer, and obliged in his youth to 
assist his father and elder brothers in the cultivation 
of the farm, and in supporting the family. Nature 
was bountiful to him, both physically and intellectu- 
ally. She gave him a tall athletic frame, symmetri- 
cal and finely moulded, handsome features, and an 
air of dignity and authority. His natural genius 
and ability fitted him to take rank with the most 
distinguished men the country has produced ; but, 
unhappily, his education was very defective, and his 
acquired knowledge and information were even to the 
last very limited. But his intellect was naturally 
acute, active, fertile, and vigorous. He always 
struck me — and I knew him well in the later years 
of his life — as one who, if he chose, might excel in 
whatever he undertook. In his earlier years, he was 
regarded has harsh,' bitter, and sarcastic in his tem- 
per, but when I knew him personally, he was witty 



> 



48 THE CONVERT. 

indeed, fond of his joke, like most New Englanders, 
but an agreeable and kind-hearted old gentleman, 
very fond of children, and possessing great power to 
fascinate young men, and win their confidence and 
affection. In my boyhood he was settled in Barnard, 
Vermont, about five miles from the old people with 
whom I resided, and I often heard them speak of 
him, as some of their relatives belonged to his con- 
gregation. He was then a young man, but distin- 
guished. From Barnard he removed to Portsmouth, 
New Hampshire, and after a short residence there 
he removed to Boston, where he continued to reside 
till his death, which occurred five or six years ago. 
He was the patriarch of American Universalism, and 
at the time when I became a Universalist minister 
was its oracle, very nearly its Pope. 

It is many years since I have seen a copy of his 
Treatise on the Atonement, and I am not certain 
that I have read it since my youth. It gave a new 
phase to Universalism. Winchester, Chauncy, Hunt- 
ington, Dan Foster, John Murray, and the English- 
man John Kelly, the fathers of modern Universal- 
ism in Great Britain, Ireland, and the United States, 



BECOME A UNIVERSALIST. 49 

had been what are called orthodox Protestants, and 
retained their early views with the exception of the 
single point of the endless punishment of the wicked* 
They held the mysteries of the Trinity, the Incarna- 
tion, the Expiatory Atonement, and endeavored to 
prove the final salvation of all men by Scriptural ex- 
egesis, and arguments drawn from the love and mercy 
of Grod. Mr. Ballon changes the whole ground, and 
attacks the whole fabric of so-called Orthodox Chris- 
tianity. He adopts Arian views as to the person of 
Christ, and labors throughout his Treatise to demolish 
the doctrine of satisfaction, or of an expiatory sacri- 
fice. He is the first American writer, I am aware of, 
who combines the doctrines of modern Unitarians with 
XJniversalism. He maintains that God demanded 
no expiation, that no expiatory sacrifice was needed, 
for God pardons the sinner on simple repentance and 
reformation of life, and an expiatory sacrifice, even 
if required, could not have been made. He excludes 
grace, all transferable merit of the Head to the 
members, and maintains that grace is nothing but 
the irrevocable decrees of God irresistibly executing 
themselves in the government of the world ; he de- 
3 



50 THE CONVERT. 

nies free will, denies accountability, denies a future 
judgment, denies all rewards and punishments, de- 
nies virtue, denies sin, in all except the name, and 
consequently the whole moral order. Sin, according 
to him, originates in the flesh, in the body, and does 
not affect the soul, the spirit, which remains pure, 
uncontaminated, whatever our fleshly defilements, — 
an old Gnostic and Manichaean heresy, which in early 
times was thought to open the door to gross disor- 
ders. Sin pertaining only to the body, cannot sur- 
vive its dissolution, but is deposited with it in the 
grave. Therefore, he that is dead is freed from sin. 
This was the ground on which Mr. Ballon placed 
his defence of universal salvation. Against the doc- 
trine of endless punishment he uses the various 
Scriptural arguments used by his predecessors, ap- 
parently without perceiving their irrelevancy. He 
argues against it from the assumed injustice of all 
punishment not reformatory in its intention and na- 
ture^ and also from the justice as well as from the 
love of God. God is the author of all our actions, 
and therefore of sin. He has no right to punish us 
eternally for sins which when he made us he not only 



I 



BECOME A UNIVERSALIST. 51 

foresaw, but foreordained, predetermined us to com- 
mit. It is clear that the conception of grace does 
not belong to his system, and that he demands the 
salvation of all men, not from the mercy, but from 
the justice of God, as a right, not as a favor. These 
views are set forth and defended with great freedom 
and boldness, with wonderful acuteness and power, 
in language, clear, simple, forcible, and at times 
beautiful, and even eloquent. A book fuller of here- 
sies, and heresies of the most deadly character, not 
excepting Theodore Parker's Discourse of 3Iatters 
pertaining to Religion^ has probably never issued 
from the American press, or one better calculated to 
carry away a large class of young, ingenuous, and 
unformed minds. The heresies are indeed old, but 
they were nearly all original with the author. He 
had never read them, and there were no books within 
his reach, at the time when he wrote his Treatise, 
from which he could derive them. '^ My only aids in 
writing my Treatise on the Atonement,'' said he 
personally to me, in answer to a question I put to 
him, ^^were the Bible, Ethan Allen's Oracles of 
Reason y'' a deistical work, ^^ and my own reflections/' 



52 THE CONVERT. 

In the circumstances under whicli it was written, it 
was certainly a most remarkable production, and if 
it did the author no credit as a sound thinker, it 
certainly entitled him to rank among the most origi- 
nal thinkers of our times. It is, however, an admi- 
rable commentary on the Protestant rule of faith — 
the Bible without note or comment, interpreted by 
every one for himself. The book made a deep im- 
pression on my young mind, although I was very far 
from accepting all its doctrines or all its arguments. 
It was subtle, yet even in my youth I detected some 
portion of its sophistry, and found it repugnant to 
my moral sentiments and convictions. 

These works, together with some popular works 
openly warring against all revealed religion, indeed 
against all religion, whether revealed or natural, I 
had read before becoming a Presbyterian. They 
had a pernicious influence on my mind. They un- 
settled it, loosed it from its moorings, and filled me 
with doubt. I had in my despair gone to the Pres- 
byterian church, in order to get rid of the doubts 
they had excited, and to be taught the truth. 
Presbyterianism not being the true Church, being in 



BECOME A UNIVERSALIST. 63 

fact only a self-constituted body, though she silenced 
these doubts for a brief time, could not solve or 
remove them. When I was forced to admit that 
Presbyterianism had no authority in the matter, I 
was necessarily forced back on the point whence it 
had taken me up, when I believed, so far as I be- 
lieved any thing, the doctrine of Universalism. The 
truth is, my mind was unsettled, and in reality had 
been from the time my well-meaning aunt had un- 
dertaken to initiate me into the doctrine of Univer- 
saUsm, and I had adhered to any fixed doctrines 
only by spasmodic efforts. In reality my mind con- 
tinued unsettled for many years later than the period 
I am now treating of. I had no repose of mind, and 
found none till I got back to the Apostles' Creed, 
and found admission into the bosom of the Holy 
Catholic Church. But this by the way. 

I could not, following my own reason, and with- 
out any divinely commissioned teacher, believe in 
the doctrine of the eternal punishment of the wicked. 
It seemed to me unjust. I could conceive it just 
only on condition that God had given us an infallible 
means of knowing the truth, and sufficient power. 



54 THE CONVEKT. 

naturally or siipernaturally, of always obeying it, and 
resisting all temptations to evil. These I could not 
perceive had been given. The Protestant sophism 
could not deceive me. The Scriptures might, in- 
deed, be infallible in themselves, but they were and 
could be to me only what I understood them to be. 
They were to me solely in my understanding of 
them, and my understanding of them was not infalli- 
ble. I might err as to their sense, and entirely mis- 
interpret them. Besides, only about one-twentieth 
of mankind can read, and to those who cannot read 
the Bible is a sealed book ; for them it is as if it 
were not. What is to become of them ? How are 
they to know the truth .^ — But all should know how 
to read. Be it so ; yet they do not all know how to 
read, and we must deal with them as they are. 
They may die before they can learn to read the 
Bible. — But their natural light will suffice for them. 
Then the Scriptures are superfluous. Yet our natu- 
ral light, even if the best we have, is dim, our natu- 
ral reason is weak, and to err is human. We have 
no infallible means of knowing the truth, of knowing 



BECOME A UNIVERSALIST. 55 

what it is that God requires of us, the belief and 
worship that will be acceptable to him. 

Nor is this the worst. We are not only weak to 
know, but we are even weaker to perform. None of 
us do as well as we know. The spirit is willing, but 
the flesh is weak. I see the right, I approve itj 
and yet pursue the wrong. My will is weak, and 
my appetites and passions are strong. I am sur- 
rounded with temptations to which my firmest re- 
solves succumb. I feel the want of a moral power 
that I find not. Now it cannot be that a just and 
good Grod has placed me in this world in the midst 
of so many seductions, surrounded by so many 
enemies to my virtue, where not to fail is a miracle, 
left me in so much darkness, so frail and so morally 
weak in myself, and yet attached the penalty of 
eternal death even to my slightest transgressions. 
He knoweth our frame, he considereth our weakness, 
and hath compassion on us. These were reasons suf- 
ficient, I thought, for rejecting endless punishment. 
Indeed, the doctrine of endless punishment, as held 
by Christians, pertains to the supernatural order, 
and would not be just, if man had been left 



56 THE CONVERT. 

to the natural order, and had not received super- 
natural gifts and graces. It presupposes man to have 
been placed under a supernatural Providence, and that 
he has done more than abuse or misuse his natural 
powers. It is inflicted for the abuse of supernatural 
graces, which, if properly used, would have enabled 
us to merit the beatitude of heaven. To deny the 
supernatural aids, and yet assert the endless pun- 
ishment of the wicked, is to outrage the natural 
sense of justice common to all men. 

As to the positive part of Universalism, I felt 
less certain, both because I was not perfectly satis- 
fied that the Scriptures taught it, and because I 
had a lurking doubt of the Divine inspiration and 
authority of the Scriptures themselves. But hav- 
ing made up my mind that the endless punishment 
of the wicked was a thing not to be dreaded, I 
felt the less scruple on the subject, as no grave con- 
sequences would or could foUow even an error on the 
subject. The question of the authority of the 
Scriptures, I waived as far as possible, and I hon- 
estly thought at the time that they might be and 
ought to be explained in the sense of the final sal- 



BECOME A UNIVERSALIST. 57 

vation^ or, final happiness of all men. Taking rea- 
son for my guide and authority, I supposed that the 
Scriptures were to be explained in accordance with 
reason, so as to teach a rational doctrine ; and 
certainly^ I said, Universalism is a far more rational 
doctrine than its opposite. It may be that it is not 
proved by the strict letter of Scripture, but the 
letter killeth ; it is the spirit that giveth life ; and 
we must not be held to a strictly literal interpreta- 
tion. We must allow ourselves great latitude of 
interpretation, and look at the general intent and 
scope of the whole rather than at mere verbal state- 
ments. 

I was the more ready to adopt these loose notions 
of Scriptural interpretation from the fact that in 
falling back from Presbyterianism on my own reason, 
imperfect as I knew it to be, I necessarily excluded 
from revelation the revelation of any thing super- 
natural or above reason. The revelation might be 
supernaturally made, and so far I could admit the 
supernatural ; but it could be the revelation of no 
supernatural matter, or truth transcending the nat- 
ural order. A revelation of supernatural truth, of 
3- 



58 ' THE CONVERT. 

an order of trutli or of tilings whose nature could 
not be subjected to the judgment of natural rea- 
son, would demand a supematurally endowed and 
assisted teacher and judge, to bring it within the 
reach of my natural understanding. I rejected, 
therefore, at once, all the mysteries of faith ; treated 
them as non avenues^ and reduced Christianity to 
a system of natural religion, or, of moral and intel- 
lectual philosophy. If left to my natural reason I 
could not accept what was beyond the reach of 
natural reason. Natural reason thus became the 
measure of revealed truth ; and if so, I had the 
right to reject every interpretation of Scripture that 
deduced from it a doctrine which reason could not 
comprehend and approve. If I retained any respect 
for the Bible I must give to its language a free 
and rational interpretation. 

Moreover, the main thing could not be to dis- 
cover and know the exact truth. That could not 
be what God required of us, for if it had been, he 
would have furnished us with facile and infallible 
means of doing it. What I should aim at was not 
so much the truth as the exercise of reason, its de- 



BECOME A UNIVERSALIST. 59 

velopment and cultivation. So even if Universalism 
should turn out to be not true, I need not disturb 
myself, if I developed my faculties, and conducted 
myself as a man. Consequently, as Universalism 
appeared to me tbe more reasonable of all doctrines 
known to me, I need not hesitate to profess and 
even to preach it. I accordingly professed myself a 
Universalist, and in the twenty-second year of my 
age became a Universalist minister. 



CHAPTER IV. 

UNIVERSALISM UNSATISFACTORY. 

After leaving Presbyterianism^ I devoted some 
months to the reading of the Scriptures^ and such 
Universalist publications as were then extant, or at 
least such as were within my reach. In the autumn 
of 1825 I applied for and received a letter of fellow- 
ship as a preacher from the General Convention of 
Universalists, which met that year in Hartland, 
Vt. I remained for a year in Vermont, continuing 
my studies, part of the time with the Eeverend 
Samuel C. Loveland, a man of some learning, the 
compiler of a Greek Lexicon of the New Testa- 
ment, of no great merit, and part of the time by 
myself alone, and preaching on Sundays in various 
towns in the State, chiefly in Windsor, Eutland, 



UNIVERSALISM UNSATISFACTORY. 61 

and Kockingham Counties. In the summer of 1826 
I was ordained an evangelist by a Universalist as- 
sociation, whicli met that year at Jaffrey, N. H. 
The sermon was preached, I think, by the Kev. 
Charles Hudson, the ordaining prayer was made by 
the Eev. Paul Dean, and the charge was given by 
the Kev. Edward Turner. 

Mr. Hudson was pastor of a Universalist society 
in Westminster, Mass., and professed himself a 
Eestorationist. He has since figured a good deal 
in politics, been several times a member of the 
General Court of Massachusetts, a member of the 
Governor's Council, and several years in Congress. 
Under the Taylor-Fillmore administration, he was 
naval oflSicer of Boston and Charlestown, and after that 
connected with the Boston Atlas; but what or where 
he is now I am not informed. He was then a young 
man, very industrious, very conceited, very disputa- 
tious, with moderate learning, fair logical ability, 
and no fancy or imagination, — a dry, hard man, and 
an exceedingly dull and uninteresting preacher. I 
enjoyed, however, a comfortable nap under his ser- 
mon. He could not endure Mr. Bailouts doctrine of 



62 THE CONVERT. 

no punishment after death^ and pretended to be 
able to prove the final restoration of all men and 
devils from the Scriptures. 

Mr. Dean was a native of Barnard, Vt., ad- 
joining Royalton, and my eldest sister had been 
brought up in his father's family. He was at the time 
pastor of the Bulfinch Street Universalist Society in 
Boston, and regarded as the most popular preacher 
in the order, after Hosea Ballon, and many even 
preferred him. He was a handsome man, with a 
pleasing address, genial manners, and a most win- 
ning smile. He was a Eestorationist, a Trinitarian, 
perhaps only a Sabellian, and by no means an ad- 
mirer of Mr. Ballon, with whom he was on unfriend- 
ly terms. He ultimately, however, left the Univer- 
salist denomination, united with the Unitarians, 
and was preaching, when I last heard from him, for 
a Unitarian congregation somewhere in the Old 
Bay State. Mr. Turner was also a Eestorationist, 
minister at the time to the Universalist Society in 
Portsmouth, N, H., though I am not certain but it 
was in Charlestown, Mass. He was a tall, majestic 
person, of grave and venerable aspect, a chaste and 



UNIVERSALISM UNSATISFACTORY. 63 

dignified speaker, and the best sermonizer I ever 
knew among Universalists. But he had too refined 
and cultivated a taste to be a popular Universalist 
preacher, and finally, I believe, followed my exam- 
ple, and associated with the Unitarians. 

At the time of my ordination, those who believed 
in a future limited punishment, and those who denied 
all punishment after death, were associated together 
in one body, under the common name of Universalists. 
Subsequently, however, a division took place, and a 
portion of the former separated from the General 
Convention, as it was called, and took the name of 
Kestorationists. This schism was formed mainly 
through the instrumentality of Adin Ballou, a dis- 
tant relative of Hosea Ballou. He was a young 
convert from some evangelical sect — I forget what 
sect — and was full of zeal against the doctrine of 
no future punishment. He took with him Messrs. 
Dean, Turner, and Hudson, and several other min- 
isters less known, and formed of them a dis- 
tincti sect. But the majority even of those who 
held to a limited punishment after death remained 
with the General Convention, and the Kestorationist 



64 THE CONVERT. 

sect, after a few years of a fitful existence, became 
extinct. Its members for the most part have 
coalesced, I believe, with the Unitarians. I never 
went with the sect, though I was never one of those 
Universalists who restrict the consequences of our 
acts done in the body, whether good or bad, to this 
life. On that subject I adopted a theory of my own, 
which I afterwards found to be very generally 
adopted by American Unitarians. Mr. Adin Ballou 
did not expire with his sect. He became a socialist, 
and founded the community of Hopedale, and when 
I heard last from him, he was a spiritualist, spiritist, 
or devil- worshipper, conversing with spirits, and be- 
lieving in Andrew Jackson Davis, and the Fox girls. 
In October, 1826, I returned to the State of 
New York, in which I had resided most of the time 
since I was fourteen years of age. I stopped a short 
time in Fort Anne and Whitehall. I resided for the 
greater part of a year in Litchfield, Herkimer County, 
then a year in Ithaca, a pleasant village at the head 
of Cayuga Lake, surrounded by varied and pictur- 
esque scenery, well worthy the visit of the tourist 
and the lover of nature. I remained a few months 



UNIVERSALISM UNSATISFACTORY. 65 

at Greneva, Cayuga County, whence I removed to 
Auburn, in the same county, where I continued to 
reside till I ceased to be a Universalist minister. At 
Auburn I preached to the Universalist Society in 
that place, and edited The Gospel Advocate and 
Impartial Investigatory a semi-monthly periodical, 
which at the time of its coming under my control 
was the most widely circulated and the most influ- 
ential periodical, in this country, devoted to the in- 
terests of Universalism, though it had gained its 
circulation and influence less by its advocacy of 
Universalism, than by its opposition to the move- 
ments of the Presbyterian and other evangelical 
sects to stop the Sunday mails, to control the poli- 
tics, and to wield the social influence of the country, 
— what the same sects are still attempting by means 
of their Christian Young Men's Associations, and 
kindred societies. The periodical had been started 
at Bufialo by the Kev. Thomas Gross, who had been 
a Congregational minister in one of the Eastern 
States, but being obliged to leave his parish, had 
turned Universalist, and by the Kev. Linus S. Ever- 
ett, originally, I believe, a house and sign painter, a 



66 THE CONVERT. 

man of little learning, but a good deal of mother wit. 
He had not a pleasant expression, but otherwise he 
was a fine-looking man, had a popular address, and 
engaging manners. He had little religious belief, and 
not much moral principle, but he was a philanthro- 
pist, and talked well. 

The periodical had been removed by Mr. Everett to 
Auburn, and the proprietorship had been disposed of 
to Ulysses F. Doubleday, printer and bookseller^ pro- 
prietor and editor of the Cayuga Patriot^ and subse- 
quently a member of Congress, a man of a strong mind, 
and an able writer. He was a Universalist when I 
knew him,but he afterwards became, I heard, a Calvin- 
istic Baptist. I had written a good deal for the period- 
ical wliile at Ithaca, had had charge of it during the 
absence of its editor, and had acquired through its 
pages considerable reputation as a writer, and when 
Mr. Everett removed, its editorship was transferred 
to me. I conducted it for a year, but with more 
credit to my free, bold, and crude thinking than to 
my piety or orthodoxy even as a Universalist. In it 
is a confused medley of thoughts, and the germs of 



UNIVERSALISM UNSATISFACTORY. 67 

nearly all 1 subsequently held or published till my 
conversion to the Catholic Church. 

In the commencement of my career as a Univer- 
salist, I did my best to smother my doubts as to rev- 
elation^ and to defend Universalism as a Scriptural 
doctrine. But I succeeded only indifferently. I had 
made up my mind that endless vindictive punish- 
ment was contrary to reason, and incompatible with 
the love and goodness of God, but when I became 
forced to study the Scriptures more attentively, in 
order to defend Universalism against the objections I 
had to meet, I became satisfied that they did not 
teach the final salvation of all men, if literally inter- 
preted, and that I must either reject them as author- 
ity for reason, or else accept the doctrine of endless 
punishment. The answers we gave to the texts cited 
against us could not stand the test of honest criti- 
cism, and those we adduced in our favor were more 
specious than conclusive. Either then, since the 
doctrine of endless punishment is contrary to reason, 
I must give up reason, and then have no reason for 
accepting the Scriptures at all, and no means of de- 
termining their sense, or I must make reason the 



68 THE CONVERT. 

judge not only of the meaning of Scripture, but of 
the truth or falsity of that meaning. I chose, 
as was reasonable in my position, the latter alter- 
native, and rejected the authority of the Scrip- 
tures. 

For a time, indeed, I tried to persuade myself 
that I could reject the Scriptures as authoritative, 
and yet concede their authenticity and divine inspira- 
tion. But it would not do. If the Bible is God's 
word, it is authoritative, not only because God has 
the right to command us as our sovereign Lord and 
proprietor, but because, since he can neither deceive 
nor be deceived, his word is the highest conceivable 
evidence of truth. God is the Supreme Eeason, and 
if we have full evidence that what we take to be his 
word really is his word, it is final, and an infal- 
lible test of what is or is not reasonablCe In cases 
of apparent conflict between it and the teachings of 
reason, I must conclude not that it is wrong, but that 
I have misinterpreted reason, and assume that reason 
teaches what in reality it does not. If I understood 
reason better I should perceive no discrepancy, be- 
cause God can never teach us one thing in his word, 



UNIVERSALISM UNSATISFACTORY. 69 

and a contradictory thing through our natural rea- 
son. What he tells us in his word may be above 
reason, but cannot be against it. 

I saw this clearly enough. But my Protestant- 
ism was in my way. Before I can thus surrender 
my reason to the Bible, and conclude the reasonable- 
ness of what it teaches, or its accordance with reason 
where I do not see that accordance or that reasonable- 
ness, I must have infallible authority for asserting 
that the Bible is the word of God, and for deter- 
mining its true sense ; for the Bible can bind me 
only inasmuch as it is the word of God, and it is 
the word of God only in its true sense, the sense in- 
tended by the Holy Ghost. But I have not in either 
case this infallible authority. The Catholic Church, 
indeed, pretends to have received it, but that Church 
is out of the question. I have only my reason with 
which to determine that the Bible is God's word, 
or with which to determine its true meaning. Here 
is my difficulty. Eeason is no more in settling these 
two points than it is in settling the point as to what 
is or is not unreasonable ; and as without reason I can 
neither determine that the Bible is inspired or what 



70 THE CONVERT. 

is its sense, I cannot surrender my reason to it in cases 
where it appears to me unreasonable. I may believe 
on competent authority that a doctrine is reasonable 
although I do not perceive its reasonableness^ but I 
cannot, if I try, believe what appears to me unrea- 
sonable, on the authority of reason alone. To say 
you believe a thing unreasonable is to say that you 
do not believe it, and that you reject it. Belief 
always is and must be a reasonable act ; in it rea- 
son assents mediately or immediately, to the proposi- 
tion that it is true. Where that assent is wanting 
belief cannot be predicated. It is a contradiction in 
terms to say that you believe what you hold to be 
unreasonable. I cannot on the authority of Scrip- 
ture, established only by reason, believe what appears 
to me unreasonable. Whoever knows any thing of 
the operations of the mind knows that it is so. The 
Bible, then, without an infallible authority to assert 
it and deduce its sense, can never be authority suffi- 
cient for believing a doctrine to be reasonable, when 
that reasonableness is not apparent to the understand- 
ing. By rejecting the authority of the Church as 
the witness of revelation and judge of its meaning, I 



UNIVERSALISM UNSATISFACTORY. 71 

found myself obliged, therefore, to reject, in turn, the 
authority of the Scriptures. 

But reason, I soon discovered, in order to be able 
to judge by its own light of the truth or falsity of a 
revealed doctrine, must know independently of the 
revelation all that it can teach us. Revelation, 
then, is superfluous. I can know without it all I can 
know with it. God then cannot have made a rev- 
elation to us, for he does nothing in vain, or without 
a purpose. But as the Scriptures evidently teach 
the unreasonable doctrine of endless punishment, 
they are, if believed to be given by divine inspiration, 
worse than useless ; they are calculated to mislead, 
to perpetuate superstitious fear, and to prevent 
the world from rising to just conceptions of the love 
and goodness of God, and a just reliance on his 
providence. In the interests of truth and human 
happiness, then, I ought not only to reject the Scrip- 
tures, but to do all in my power to destroy belief in 
them as the word of God. 

I had other difficulties with Universalism. The 
ground on which I rejected endless punishment was 
that all punishment should be reformatory in its na- 



72 



THE CONVERT. 



ture and intention. All Universalists held that ven- 
geance or vindictive punishment designed to honor 
a broken law and vindicate an offended majesty is 
incompatible with the nature of a God who is love. 
Love worketh no ill to his neighbor. The nature 
of love is to make the object beloved happy as far as 
in its power. God is love^ his wisdom and power 
are unlimited. He loves all his creatures ; he can 
make them all happy, and therefore will. He can 
punish no one in his wrath ; he can only chastise us 
for our profit, " that we may be made partakers of 
his holiness.'' Then no vindictive punishment. 

We all hold this doctrine. But this doctrine de- 
nies that sin is ever punished. If pain is inflicted 
upon a sinner, it is not to punish his sin, but to re- 
form him. The quantity of pain must not be measured 
by the quantity of sin committed. The infliction 
can have no reference to wrong done or guilt incurred, 
and its amount must be determined by the amount 
necessary to reform the wrong-doer. It then is not 
punishment at all. Its motive is not to punish, but 
to benefit him who suffers it, and may as well be in- 
flicted on the innocent as on the guilty, if it will do 



UNIVERSALISM UNSATISFACTORY. 73 

him good^ or will redound to his advantage. From 
pain inflicted for one's benefit, it can be no advantage 
to save him. How then can I talk of a Saviour ? 
Universalists say Jesus Christ is the Saviour of all 
men. But from what does he save them ? From 
punishment; from a penalty annexed to the Divine 
law ? No, for Grod never annexed any penalty to 
the breach of his law, for he never punishes to vindi- 
cate his law. All the penalty, all the consequence 
of sin is simply to be whipped till we sin no more, 
and from that whipping Christ saves no one. How 
then, can I call him a Saviour ? 

He is a Saviour, we answered, in that he saves us 
from sinning. '^ Thou shalt call his name Jesus, for 
he shall save his people from their sins.'' Yet he 
does not save us from sinning, for we go on sinning 
every day. But how does or can he save us from 
sinning .? Not by infusing believing and sanctifying 
grace into our hearts, for the doctrine of infused 
grace is rejected by all Protestants, who when they 
recognize grace at all as operating within us, recog- 
nize it only as a transient act of God, not as an in- 
fused habit of the soul. He can save us only by his 
4 



74 THE CONVERT. 

doctrine and example. His example is for ns only 
the example of a good man^ better than that of any 
other, because more perfect, yet differing from that of 
others only in degree. His doctrine — who can say 
what it is ? Can I say honestly that I know what 
he taught ? Did he teach the endless punishment 
of the wicked ? If so, he does not save us by his 
doctrine from sinning, for we have agreed that the 
doctrine of endless punishment has an immoral tend- 
ency, inasmuch as it denies the love and goodness of 
God, and represents him as partial, vindictive, and 
unjust. Did he teach Universalism, that all men 
are sure of heaven, and cannot possibly miss it? 
Did he teach that vice has no punishment, virtue no 
reward, that Judas, Pilate, and Herod will receive a 
crown of life as well as Peter, James, and John, and 
a crown equally bright, unfading, eternal in the 
heavens ? How does that doctrine save us from sin- 
ning, or tend to make us virtuous ? What motive 
to virtue does it present ? what consideration to deter 
from vice ? Do my best I cannot make my eternal 
felicity surer ; do my worst, I cannot render it less 
sure. Why then shall I trouble myself about the 



UNI VERS ALISM UNSATISFACTORY. 75 

matter? Let me eat, drink, and be merry, for to- 
morrow I die, and go — to heaven. Here then I have 
lost the authority of the Church, the authority and 
inspiration of the Scriptures^ even my Saviour him- 
self, and with him the last vestige of revealed reli- 
gion. Surely I have had a marvellous facility in 
losing. Wonder what I have gained ? 

But as the world looks upon Jesus as a Saviour, 
and gathers round him a multitude of superstitious 
notions which make men mental and moral slaves, 
and prevent them from asserting their freedom, their 
manhood, standing up and acting like men, he, so far 
from saving them from sinning, actually prevents 
them from being saved, and becomes the occasion of 
their moral degradation and misery. I ought then to 
war against him, and to do my best to deliver the 
world from its bondage to him. Thus I may myself 
become a saviour, and be entitled to the respect he 
usurps. Hence my Universalism made me, so far as 
logic could go, not only a non-Christian, but an anti- 
Christian. This was my reasoning at the time, not 
merely my reasoning now. 

But mj troubles did not end here. In order to 



76 THE CONVERT. 

meet the objection that Universalism was of a licen- 
tious tendency, and opened the floodgates of iniquity, 
we laid particular stress on the certainty of punish- 
ment, and the impossibility of escaping it. We main- 
taiaed that every one would receive according to the 
deeds done in the body, and even here in this world, 
that God will by no means clear the guilty, that as a 
msn sows so shall he reap, and that he must pay the 
debt he contracts, pay it in his own person, and " to 
the uttermost farthing/' We were, after having said 
this, accustomed to turn upon our assailants and to 
tell them that their doctrine of a punishment put off 
till after the day of judgment, and their doctrine of 
repentance and remission of sin, by which the vilest 
sinner, a hard-faced grinding Presbyterian, or Con- 
gregationalist deacon, by a simple act of faith, could 
escape his just deserts, and take his rank in heaven as 
a saint of the first water, might with far more justice 
be charged with an immoral and licentious tendency. 
But this doctrine, if it meant any thing, denied all 
pardon, all forgiveness, all mercy, all compassion on 
the part of God, all interposition on his part in favor 
of the transgressor. God leaves the sinner to the 



UNIVERSALISM UNSATISFACTORY. 77 

mercy of the order he has established. He has nirde 
the worldj adjusted its parts, impressed on it its laws, 
given it a jog, and bid it go ahead and take care of 
itself. Then I lose my Father in heaven, for God is 
only my creator, and is no more my father than he is 
the father of the reed or the oak. I lose Providence, 
and am reduced to an inflexible and inexorable na- 
ture. Prayer, repentance, devotion, entreaty, can 
avail me nothing. God has intrenched himself be- 
hind the natural laws, and cannot hear me, will not 
interpose to help me. With this went even natural 
religion. 

But as God inflicts pain only for the sake of 
reformation, as he never punishes sin or rewards vir- 
tue, all idea of moral accountability must be aban- 
doned. God will never bring us into judgment for 
our conduct. Then there is no power above us to defend 
oppressed innocence, and to vindicate the majesty of 
right. Then what is the criterion of right and wrong ? 
Both must be alike pleasing to God, and if both are 
alike pleasing to him, if he regards with equal com- 
placency the sinner and the saint, what is the radical 
difference between them ? None that I can see. 



78 THE CONVERT. 

Gocl wills our happiness ; then what makes us happy 
must be regarded as good, and what makes us miser- 
able must be regarded as evil. An action is virtuous, 
then, because it promotes our happiness, produces 
pleasurable emotions in ourselves, or in others, and vice 
is that which does not promote our happiness, which 
causes painful emotions in us or in others. Virtue is 
virtue because it promotes happiness, and vice is vice 
because it brings misery. Then no objective dis- 
tinction between virtue and vice, between good and 
evil. Here, said I, is the very foundation of morality 
undermined. 

God governs the world, I said, only by general 
laws which he has impressed on it in creating it, and 
witli the natural operation of these he never inter- 
feres. These laws admit the existence of evil. The 
world is full of suffering ; man preys upon man, and 
the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain. 
What is to hinder it from being always so ? What 
is to put an end to evil, to pain and suffering ? 
What is to insure the triumph of good ? No new 
law can be introduced ; no new power can be de- 
veloped. What, then, is to assure us that evil will 



I 



UNIVERSALISM UNSATISFACTORY. 79 

ever be less ? The goodness of Grod, you tell me. 
But how am I to be assured that God is good ? I 
can prove his goodness only from nature, and in na- 
ture the evil seems to surpass the good. Here Uni- 
versalism, said I, runs itself out, and renders doubt- 
ful even its own premises. 

It must not be supposed that I accepted all 
these frightful conclusions. They followed logically 
from my premises, and logically I was obliged to 
accept them ; yet my good sense and my better feel- 
ings rebelled against them. My mind could neither 
reject nor accept them. It was in doubt ; it was 
unsettled, uncertain, in a snarl, and I could see no 
wiser course to pursue than to dismiss the whole 
subject from my thoughts. I know nothing, I said, 
and can know nothing on the subject, and let me 
not attempt to decide any thing respecting it one 
way or the other. I may trust my senses, and be- 
lieve in the world of sensible phenomena. I will 
henceforth confine myself to that, and leave alone 
aU metaphysical or theological speculations, and 
neither assert nor deny the invisible and the spiritual. 
Thus I had, following reason, lost the Bible, lost my 



80 THE CONVERT. 

Saviour, lost Providence, lost reason itself, and had 
left me only my five senses, and wtat could fall un- 
der their observation, — that is, reduced myself to a 
mere animal. 

But, with these doubts hanging over me, it was 
clear that I could not, as an honest man, present 
myself before the public as a Christian minister. It 
is true, I did not write or preach differently from 
what I thought and felt ; nobody could really be 
deceived as to the state of my mind. Many of my 
brother ministers knew my doubts. They blamed 
me, it is true^ not for entertaining them, but for not 
keeping them to myself. Some of them, I knew 
from their confidential communications, believed no 
more than I did, and my conviction at the time was^ 
that Universalists generally had no belief in revela- 
tion, and were really deists or skeptics, and professed 
to be Christians only because they could combat all 
religion more successfully under a nominally Chiis- 
tian banner, than under the banner of open, avowed 
infidelity. In this I am inclined to beheve I did 
them injustice. I gave them credit for being deeper 
thinkers and better logicians than they were. Few 



UNIVERSALISM UNSATISFACTORY. 81 

men ever reason out their own system s, or compare 
all the parts of the system they embrace with one 
another. I did not always do this myself. Uni- 
versalists did not generally think beyond the few 
points brought into discussion between them and 
the so-called Orthodox, and never troubled them- 
selves to inquire whether the ground on which they 
defended their Universalism could be assumed with- 
out involving a denial of Christianity, or npt. 

But, although , I was beginning to acquire a 
prominent position in the denomination, I felt that 
I ought to leave it. I could not consent to profess 
what I did not honestly believe ; and my irritation 
at myself for my want of manliness, and strict hon- 
esty in continuing to preach after I had ceased to 
believe, increased my doubts, and made me think I 
doubted even more than I really did. The moment 
I broke off my connection with the Universalis ts, 
and took my position openly and above board, not as 
a disbeliever, but as an unbeliever, I felt restored 
to my manhood, I felt like a new man. My imi- 
tation ceased, and almost instantly the tone of Kiy 
feelings changed towards Christianity. I was no 



82 THE CONVERT. 

longer obliged to profess or to seem to profess more 
than I believed ; and from that moment my mind 
began to recover its balance^ and the most anti- 
Christian period of my life was the last two years 
that I was a Universalist preacher. 



CHAPTEK V. 

BECOME A WORLD-REFORMER. 

It was never in my nature, any more than it is in 
that of the human race^ to take up with a purely 
negative system. My craving to believe was always 
strong, and it never was my misfortune to be of a 
skeptical turn of mind. But if I craved something 
to believe, it was never for the sake of believing. I 
wanted the truth, would labor for it, harder than 
most men perhaps, but never to stop with its mere 
apprehension or barren contemplation. My disposi- 
tion was practical rather than speculative, or even 
meditative, like that of the majority of my country- 
men. I sought the truth in order to know what I 
ought to do, and as the means of realizing some 
moral or practical end. I wanted it that I might 
use it. 



84 THE CONVERT. 

While my Universalism was escaping me. I had 
been engaged in acquiring a positive belief of an- 
other sort. My early religious belief^ vague as it 
was^ gave me an end to labor for, that of getting 
religion, and preparing myself, with God^s grace, for 
eternal happiness in heaven. Even the Assembly's 
Catechism had taught me that ^^the chief end of 
man is to glorify God, and enjoy him for ever.'' I 
had in my childhood no difficulty as to the end ; my 
difficulty was only as to the means of gaining it. 
Universalism deprived me of that end, as an end to 
live and labor for^ by teaching me that it was just 
as certain without as with my personal exertions. It 
left my life here very nearly purposeless. The most 
I had to do was to combat Orthodoxy, and spread 
Universalism, a very meagre work, for it effected 
nothing one way or another in relation to the 
final result. Why should I do it ? And when I 
have done it, and got all the world to believe Uni- 
versalism, what will remain for me or others to do ? 
But some work I must have, something to do, to 
prevent my activity from recoiling upon itself, and 
as Universalism had made me doubt the utUity of all 



BECOME A WORLD-REFpRMER. 85 

labors for another world^ I was forced to look for a 
work to be done for this world. I had made nothing 
of my religious speculations^ nothing of my inquiries 
as to the invisible and the heavenly, and reason 
counselled me, obliged me to leave them, to drop 
from the clouds, take my stand on the solid earth, 
and devote myself to the material order, to the 
virtue and happiness of mankind in this earthly life. 
Certainly this did not perfectly satisfy me, in the 
beginning ; but it seemed the only alternative that 
was left me. I had no choice in the matter. With 
the fear of hell, the hope of heaven had escaped, 
and as the other world disappeared from my view, 
nothing but this world did or could remain. 
]/ About the time of my becoming a Universalist 
minister, Eobert Owen, from New Lanark, Scot- 
land, came to this country for the purpose of estab- 
lishing a Community, and to commence the realiza- 
tion of his plans of World-Reform. Mr. Owen was 
a Welshman by birth, and bred a cotton spinner. 
He was engaged, while still a young man, to take 
charge of the extensive cotton mills at New Lanark, 
in Scotland, owned by a Mr. Dale, whose daughter 



86 THE CONVEKT. 

he subsequently married. Through this marriage 
he became part^ and at lengthy if I am not mista- 
ken, sole proprietor of the millS; which made nim 
a rich man. While acting as manager, more espe- 
cially as part or sole proprietor, he introduced seve- 
ral wise and judicious arrangements which added 
much to the cleanliness, decorum, thrift, and phy- 
sical comfort of the workmen. From the success of 
his experiments at New Lanark, and from the man- 
ifest improvement he had been able to introduce in 
the condition of the population employed in the 
mills, or under his care and supervision, he concluded 
that he had discovered the secret of so organizing 
mankind as to cure all individual and social evils, 
and to make all men rich, virtuous, and happy. 

Mr. Owen was a man of much simplicity and 
benevolence of character. He knew little of Chris- 
tianity, and believed less, but he was philanthropic, 
and was ready to make very heavy sacrifices for the 
happiness of mankind, or, rather, for realizing his 
plans for making them happy. He drew up an out- 
line of. liis plan and presented it to the principal 
crowned heads, ministers, statesmen, and literary 



BECOME A WORLD-REFORMER. 87 

and scientific men of Europe ; but not meeting 
with the degree of encouragement he looked for, 
and doubting whether the Old World was the place 
for trying his experiment, he resolved on coming to 
the United States, — the best place in the world for 
visionaries to recover their wits, and to find their 
fanciful schemes explode. He came when John 
Quincy Adams was President, though I do not now 
recall the precise date, and laid his plans before Mr. 
Adams, the Congress, and the people of the United 
States. His respectability as a man, his sincerity, 
his apparent benevolence, and his practical sagacity 
in particulars, gained him respectful treatment, and 
a candid hearing. Many listened with favor, and a 
few with enthusiasm. He soon succeeded in gain- 
ing a number of followers ; and elated, he purchased 
a settlement called Harmony, in Posey County, In- 
diana, named it New Harmony, and established 
there, with a band of enthusiasts and adventurers, 
some from Europe, some from the United States, a 
provisional community, preparatory to the complete 
introduction of his plan of community life, and uni- 
versal World-Keform. 



88 THE CONVERT. 

Mr. Owen's great principle or maxim was, that 
man is passive, not active in the formation of his 
character ; that his character is formed not by him, 
but for him, by education, or the circumstances in 
which he is born, grows up, and lives. Since man is 
passive in the formation of his character, in the 
hands of circumstances like clay in the hands of Ihe 
potter, it is practicable by a skilful arrangement of 
circumstances, or by a proper arrangement of the ex- 
ternal influences brought to bear on him, to mould his 
character into that of the most consummate wisdom, 
and the most heroic virtue. Hitherto all had gone 
wrong ; circumstances had been arranged to corrupt 
and debase man's character. Man has thus far been 
cursed with a trinity of evils, property, marriage, 
and religion. Abolish these, bring men and women 
to live together in communities of from one to two 
thousand in each, inure theni to live in parallelo- 
grams, with all things in common, in perfect equali- 
ty, with the circumstances bearing equally upon all 
and each, and you will form their characters to vir- 
tue, and provide for the proper education of their 
offspring. There will then be no poverty, no iue- 



BECOME A WORLD-EEFORMER. 89 

quality, no want, no envy, no discontent, no disease, 
no vice, no crime, but all will be peace, love, mutual 
good-will, kindness, virtue, harmony, bliss. The 
dream was not without its charm. But the poor man 
was not destined to realize it. His Harmony after a 
few months proved to be no harmony at all, but harsh 
discord, rathei*. He had taken the precaution to keep 
the property he invested in his establishment in his 
own name. His disciples murmured at this, as an in- 
consistency on his part, though they were living at his 
expense, and thought he ought to carry out his princi- 
ples and abolish private property at once, and bestow 
all he called his own on the community, to be held in 
common by its members. They succeeded, I be- 
lieve, in cozening him out of a considerable sum, of 
involving him in pecuniary embarrassment, and 
forcing him to sell his New Lanark property. They 
then separated, and several of them went through 
the country abusing him for his want of consistency, 
and his unwillingness to make greater sacrifices for 
their benefit. 

The plan was silly enough, and its success would 
have made men only well-trained and well-fed ani- 



90 THE CONVERT. 

malSj and I vvdll say this for myself tliat I never fully 
adopted it. I had some trouble in beheving that 
man was perfectly passive in the formation of his 
character ; and if he was, I could not see how the 
circumstances were to be controlled by him, and be 
brought to bear equally upon all and upon each. If 
he was to have no want, I was puzzled to understand 
what was to stimulate him to exertion, and if he 
made no exertion, I could not understand how he 
was to become intellectually great, or to produce the 
wherewith to provide for his animal wants. But Mr. 
Owen's discourses, publications, and movements drew 
my attention to the social evils which exist in every 
land, to the inequalities which obtain even in our own 
country, where political equality is secured by law, 
and to the question of reorganizing society and cre- 
ating a paradise on earth. My sympathies were en- 
listed, I became what is now called a socialist, and 
found for many years a vent for my activity in devis- 
ing, supporting, refuting, and rejecting theories and 
plans of World-Keform. 

Failing to find an authority competent to teach 
me the true sense of a supernatural revelation, I had 



BECOME A WORLD-REFORMER. 91 

step by step rejected all such revelation^ and brought 
myself back to simple nature, to the world of the 
senses, and to this sublunary life. I neither asserted 
nor denied the existence of God. I neither believed 
nor disbelieved in a life after death. The position I 
took was, these are matters of which I know nothing, 
of which I can know nothing, and therefore are mat- 
ters of which I will endeavor not to think. Of this 
world of the senses I do and may know something. 
Here is a work to be done, here is the scene of my 
labors, and here I will endeavor to love mankind and 
make them happy. I had indeed a very hmited 
creed, but nevertheless I had one, which I firmly 
held. Half in mockery, but at bottom in sober 
earnest, I drew up and published it such as it was 
just before leaving Universalism. I must be per- 
mitted to transcribe it. 

MY CREED. 

" Almost every man has a creed. There are few 
who do not worship their creed with more devotion 
than they do their God, and labor a thousand times 
harder to support it than they do the truth. Now I 
do not like to be singular, and I know not why I may 



92 THE CONVERT. 

not have a creed as well as other folk. But if I pub- 
lish my creed, consistency may require me to defend 
it, and when I have once enlisted self-love in its de- 
fence, I may become blind to the truth, and choose 
rather to abide by my first decision than to admit that 
I have once decided wrong. Yet a creed I must and 
will have, and my readers shall know what it is. 

'^ My creed shall consist of five points, (in allu- 
sion to the five points of Calvinism, defined by the Sy- 
nod of Dort,) and shall embrace all the essentials of 
true religion. Furthermore I wish to premise that 
my creed was not adopted merely to-day ; it has 
been cordially embraced, and of its correctness I have 

had no doubts for at least nine months I 

would allege in behalf of my creed, that it is plain, 
easy to be understood, and withal involves no mys- 
tery. The pious, however, from this circumstance 
may be led to doubt its divine origin, and infidels 
may like it so well that I shall be shut out from the 
Church. But I will state it, though I must still 
further allege that I believe it to be based on eternal 
truth, and it is calculated, if obeyed, to harmonize 
this world, and to enable the vast family of man to 



BECOME A WORLD-REFORMER. 93 

live forever under the smiles of fraternal affection. 
But for the creed. 

" Art. I. I believe that every individual of the 
human family should be honest. 

^^ Art. II. I believe that every one should be be- 
nevolent and kind to all. 

'^ Art. III. I believe that every one should use 
his best endeavors to procure food^ clothing, and shel- 
ter for himself, and labor to enable all others to procure 
the same for themselves to the full extent of his 
ability. 

" Art. IV. I believe every one should cultivate 
lis mental powers, that he may open to himself new 
sources of enjoyment, and also be enabled to aid his 
brethren in their attempts to improve the condition 
of the human race, and to increase the sum of human 
happiness. 

" Art. V. I believe that if all mankind act on 
these principles they serve Grod all they can serve 
him, that he who has this faith and conforms the 
nearest unto what it enjoins, is the most acceptable 
unto God.^^ - 

* Gosioel Advocate and LrqMrtial Investigator^ June 27, 
1829. 



94 THE CONVERT. 

It is easy to see from this creed, so called in mock- 
ery, that I rejected heaven for earth, and God for 
man, eternity for time, as the end for which I was to 
live and labor. The first article indicates my im- 
pression that people generally, whatever their pre- 
tences, did not seriously believe in a supernatural 
revelation. I had, too, been rendered impatient by 
the lectures I received from various quarters on my 
imprudence in not concealing my doubts. I disliked 
seeming to be what I was not, or professing to believe 
what I did not believe. I could see no merit in pro- 
fessing to be a Christian when I knew I was no 
Christian. I wanted to appear fighting under my own 
colors, to speak out my honest thought, and let it 
go for v/hat it was worth. Yet I was met with re- 
monstrance. I was not blamed for my thought, but 
for telling it ; and blamed for telling it, not on the 
ground that it was false, but on the ground that it was 
bad policy to tell it. I hated what is called policy 
then, and I have no great fondness for it even yet. A 
man's life-blood is frozen in its current, his intellect 
deadened,, and his very soul annihilated by the ever- 
lasting dinging into his ears by the wise and prudent. 



BECOME A WORLD-EEFORMER. 95 

more properly the timid and selfish^ of the admonition 
to be politic, to take care not to compromise one's cause 
or one's friends. My soul revolted, and revolts even to- 
day at this admonition. Almost the only blunders I 
ever committed in my life were committed when I stu- 
died to be politic, and prided myself on my diplomacy. 
[/ Prudence is a virtue, and rashness is a sin, but 
my own reason and experience have taught me that 
truth is a far more trustworthy support than the best 
devised scheme of human policy possible. Honesty 
is the best policy. Be honest with thyself, be hon- 
est with all the world, be true to thy convictions, be 
faithful to what truth thou hast, be it ever so little, 
and never dream of supplying its defect by thy as- 
tuteness or craft. Certainly be so, if thou believest in 
a God who is truth itself, and with whom to lie is 
impossible. Fear not for thy cause, if thou believest 
it his cause, for it must stand and prosper in his wis- 
dom and power, not in thy human sagacity, thy hu- 
man prudence, thy human pohcy. Throw thyself 
heart and soul on his truth ; it will sustain thee ; if 
not, be contented to fail. It is comparatively easy 
to know what is true, what is virtuous, but what, 



96 THE CONVERT. 

aside from fidelity to truth and virtue^ is wise poli- 
cy, or genuine prudence^ surpasses the wit of men to 
say. Never yefc has a great saint arisen without 
seemingj to even great and good men in Church or 
State as well as to the wise and prudent men of the 
world, terribly rash, shockingly imprudent. No one 
can be a man, and do a man's work, unless he is sin- 
cere, unless he is in earnest, terribly in earnest, 
throwing his whole heart and soul into his work, and 
whoever does so may depend upon it that the chief 
men of his sect, his party, or his school, if not of his 
church, will be alarmed at his conduct, will accuse 
'him of being ultra, of going too far, of endangering 
every thing by his rashness, his want of prudence, of 
poHcy. I am no saint, never was, and never shall be 
a saint. I am not and never shall be a great man ; 
but I always had, and I trust I always shall have the 
honor of being regarded by my friends and associates 
as impolitic, as rash, imprudent, and impracticable. 
I was and am in my natural disposition frank, truth- 
ful, straight-forward, and earnest, and therefore have 
had, and I doubt not, shall carry to the grave with 
me, the reputation of being reckless, ultra, a well- 



BECOME A WORLD-REFORMER, 97 

meaning man, perhaps an able man, but so fond 
of paradoxes and extremes, tbat he cannot be re- 
lied on, and is more likely to injure than serve the 
cause he espouses. So wise and prudent men shake 
their heads, when my name is mentioned, and dis- 
claim all solidarity with me. 

I must be pardoned this burst of indignation, an 
indignation which dictated the first article of my creed 
of 1829, and which is stronger than I wish it in 1857. 
I have suffered so much from the prudence of associ- 
ates, have received so many admonitions in relation 
to my alleged ultraisms, and tendency to run to ex- 
tremes, so many cautions to be moderate, to be pru- 
dent, to be politic, and the like, that I am a little 
sore on the point, and cannot keep as cool on the 
subject as becomes a man of my age, gravity, and ex- 
perience. Yet it is not wholly a personal matter 
with me. I am past my prime of life, and shall 
soon be beyond the reach of any personal annoyance 
I may feel. But I would leave my protest against this 
tendency on the part of the worshippers of routine 
to damp the courage and to stifle the e;nergy of young 
and ardent spirits who come forward to devote them- 



98 THE CONVEKT. 

selves to tlie cause of trutli and virtue. If what a man 
says is true^ and is evidently said with an honest in- 
tention, do not decry him, do not disown him, do not 
beat the life out of him by lectures on prudence ; 
stand by him, and bear with him the odium he may 
incur by telling the tiTith, encourage him by your 
respect for his honesty and candor, and shelter him 
as far as in your power from the reproaches of weak 
and timid brethren ; for be assured we live in an age 
and country where honesty and candor, fidelity to 
one's honest convictions and moral courage in avow- 
ing them, are not virtues likely to become excessive. 
Fidelity to what one believes to be true, moral cour- 
age in adhering to our convictions before the world, is 
the greatest want of our times. The age lacks above 
all things sincerity, earnestness. Give us back these, 
give us back the old-fashioned loyalty of heart, and 
we shall not need to labor long to bring the age to 
see, own, and obey the truth. The subjective heresy 
of the age is a far greater obstacle to its conversion 
than its objective errors. What men most lack is 
principle, is the feehng that they should be true to the 
right, and that to be manly is to be ready to follow 



BECOME A WORLD-REFORMER. 99 

the truth under whatever guise it may come, to what- 
ever it may lead, to the loss of reputation, to pov- 
erty, to beggary, to the dungeon or the scaffold, to ' 
the stake or exile. ( I have had my faults, great and 
grievous faults, as well as others, but I have never 
had that of disloyalty to principle, or of fearing to own 
my honest convictions, however unpopular they might 
be, or however absurd or dangerous the public might 
-regard them. Give me rather the open, honest unbe- 
liever, who pretends to believe nothing more than he 
really does believe, than your sleek, canting hypocrite, 
who rolls up his eyes in holy horror of unbelief, and 
makes a parade of his orthodoxy, when he believes 
not a word in the Gospel, and has a heart which is a 
cage of unclean beasts, out of which more devils need 
to be cast than were cast out of the Magdalen. \ The 
former may never see God, but the latter deserves the 
lowest place in hell. There is hope of the conversion 
of a nation of unbelievers ; of the conversion of a nation 
of hypocrites none. Sincerity in error is respect- 
able ; insincerity in the truth is of all things the 
most reprehensible, for it proves the heart is wholly 
false, a mass of corruption, in which even divine 



100 THE CONVERT. 

grace can find^ I was about to say, nothing to work 
upon, certainly nothing likely to concur with it. 

If my conscience would have let me pretend to 
be a Christian, after it became clear I was no Chris- 
tian believer, if I could without suffering its re- 
proaches have continued to profess myself a Universal- 
ist, after I had ceased to believe in revelation, though 
writing or preaching nothing which I did not really 
believe, I doubt if the grace of Grod would ever have 
rescued me from my errors, and I must think it was 
his grace that would not suffer me to do so. My hon- 
est avowal of unbelief was, under the circumstances, 
a step that brought me nearer the kingdom of God. 
I believe that the mass of my countrymen will make 
little advance towards the Gospel till they come back 
to honest nature, and consent to own to themselves 
and to the world what they really are. It is neces- 
sary first of all to make away with all shams, to use one 
of Carlyle's terms, to get rid of all illusions, and to be- 
lieve a lie is a lie, and that no lie shall stand. We live 
in an age of shams, of illusions, and the saddest thing 
of all is that while we have no faith in reality, we 
believe in shams, we trust illusions, and say^ These 



BECOME A WORLD-REFORMER. 101 

be thy gods, Israel, that have brought thee up 
out of the land of Egypt. If we have not advanced 
to faith in the Gospel, let us return to simple nature, 
and have at least the natural order, which after all is 
real, on which to plant our feet. 

The end of man, as disclosed by ^^ my creed '^ of 
1829, is obviously an earthly end, to be attained in 
this life. Man was not made for God, and destined 
to find his beatitude in the possession of God, his 
supreme good, the Supreme Good itself. His end 
was happiness, not happiness in God, but in the 
possession of the good things of this world. Our 
Lord had said. Be not anxious as to what ye shall 
eat, or what ye shall drink, or wherewithal ye shall be 
clothed, for after all these things do the heathen seek. 
I gave him a flat denial, and said, Be anxious, labor 
especially for these things, first for yourselves, then 
for others. Enlarging, however, my views a little, I 
said, Man's end, for which he is to labor, is the well- 
being and happiness of mankind in this world, — is 
to develop man's whole nature, and so to organize so- 
ciety and government as to secure all men a paradise 
on the earth. This view of the end to labor for I 



102 THE CONVERT. 

held steadily and without wavering from 1828 till 
1842^ when I began to find myself tending uncon- 
sciously towards the Catholic Church. The various 
systems I embraced^ or defended^ whether social or 
pohtical, ethical or gesthetical, philosophical or the- 
ological, were all subordinated to this end, as means 
by which man's earthly condition was to be melio- 
rated. I sought truth, I sought knowledge, I sought 
virtue for no other end, and it was, not in seeking 
to save my soul, to please God, or to have the true 
religion, that I was led to the Catholic Church, but 
to obtain the means of gaining the earthly happiness 
of mankind. My end was man's earthly happiness, 
and my creed was progress. In regard to neither 
did I change or swerve in the least, till the truth of 
the Catholic Church was forced upon my mind and 
my heart. During the period of fourteen years, the 
greater part of which I was accused of changing at 
least once every three months, I never changed once 
in my principles or my purposes, and all I did 
change were my tools, my instruments, or my modes 
of operation. 

In renouncing Universalism, which with me was 



BECOME A WORLD-KEFORMER. 103 

only a stage in my transition from the religion of my 
childhood to socialism, I had renounced all fear and 
all hope in regard to another world, and though sub- 
sequently, as a Unitarian, I held to a future existence, 
it was merely a continuation of our natural life, a 
natural immortality, which did not include the resur- 
rection of the flesh, or rewards and punishments in a 
Christian sense. I felt easy in regard to the future, 
and was in the habit of maintaining that the best 
way to secure a heaven hereafter is to create a heaven 
for mankind in this world. For years I held this 
maxim, and never troubled myself at all in regard 
to what might be my fate or that of others after 
death. I had a firm belief in progress, full confi- 
dence in philosophy, and a strong desire to contri- 
bute to the welfare of my fellow-men, to reform the 
world, and create an earthly paradise for the human 
race ; but I had very little thought or sense of my 
duty to God, and no serious care for any thing be- 
yond the service of my neighbor in relation to this 
life. I recognized God, but only in man, and I held 
that he exists for us only in human nature. 

For years I went no farther in my thoughts, and 



104 THE CONVERT. 

thirsted for nothing higher or broader. I had 
schooled my feelings and my imagination to my 
narrow carnal Judaism^ and experienced nothing of 
that craving for an unseen and spiritual good, that 
secret longing for God and religion of which so much 
use is made in our arguments against unbelievers. 
I felt none of that trouble which I felt formerly 
when I found my childhood^s belief escaping me. I 
am convinced by my own experience that our phi- 
lanthropists and world- reformers may become so en- 
grossed in their plans that they do not experience 
that aching void within, that emptiness of all created 
things, which we sometimes imagine. Their philan- 
thropy is a religion unto them. Even failures do not 
at once discourage them, for they find their relief in 
their doctrine of progress. It is idle to tell them that 
the good they seek is bounded, and that the soul 
craves an unbounded good; for holding to progress, to 
the indefinite perfectibility of man, they are unable 
to assign any limits to the good to which they are 
wedded, and as progress implies imperfection, they 
have a ready excuse for their failures. We have 
failed to-day, but we shall succeed to-morrow. I 



BECOME A WORLD-REFORMER. 105 

was mistaken^ my experiment was not successful^ 
but I will do better next time. Or if I die without 
succeeding, the human race is progressive, each new 
generation is wiser than the last, and the generation 
coming after me will succeed, and my labors, my 
experiments, my failures even, will perhaps contri- 
bute to its success. So they will not be in vain. In- 
dividuals die, but the race survives, is immortal. 
Thus hope revives from failure, and the individual 
consoles himself with the belief that what he cannot 
accomplish, the race in its march through the ages 
will effect, and his labors meet their reward in the 
increased virtue and happiness of mankind. 

We cannot reach the socialist, who has made a 
religion of his socialism, by appeals to his love of 
happiness, or to the failures of his undertakings. I 
would that I could feel the fervor, the enthusiasm in 
the cause of the truth, which at one period I felt in 
the cause of socialism. The fact is, the socialist is 
not all wrong. You may declaim against him as much 
as you please, but it will be none the less true that 
he is often governed by noble instincts, by generous 
sentiments, which Christianity does not disov/n, but 



106 THE CONVERT. 

accepts and consecrates. He has also certain aspects 
even of Christian truth^ or aspects of truth which 
without the Christian revelation and the operations 
of Christian charity he never would have beheld. 
In those aspects of truth which he has, and to which 
he is devoted, we must take our point of departure, 
in leading him to renounce his errors. 



CHAPTEE VI. 

METHODS OF WORLD-EEFORM. 

I HAD fixed the end for which I was to labor, — the 
creation of an earthly paradise ; but the means of 
gaining it were not well determined. My own mind 
was very nearly balanced between two contradictory 
theories, — ^the theory of individualism, and that of 
communism. I had read, had, in fact, studied with 
great assiduity, one of the most remarkable works in 
our language, An Enquiry concerning the Principles 
of Political Justice, if I recollect the title aright, by 
William Godwin, originally a Calvinistic dissenting 
minister, at Stowmarket, England, whence, in 1787, 
he removed to London, where he devoted himself to 
literature. He was the author of " Caleb Williams,'' 
" St. Leon," " Fleetwood," '' MandeviUe," " Clouds- 
ley," a work ^^on Population," in reply to Malthus, 



108 THE CONVERT. 

'^A History of the Commonwealtli of England/' 
^^ The Life and Times of Chaucer/' and several other 
works^ the titles of which I forget. He married, in 
1797, Mary Wolstoncroft, a writer of some distinc- 
tion, best known as the author of a work entitled 
" Eights of Woman/' a ]3endant to Paine's " Eights 
of Man/' and which may be regarded as the Bible of 
our Women's Eights party. She was the mother of 
Mary Godwin, who wrote Frankenstein, a most fear- 
ful story, fitted to give one the nightmare for three 
weeks after reading it, and who, after his divorce 
from his wife, was regarded as married to the poet 
Shelley. Godwin's novels were much read in their 
day, and it is easy to trace their influence in the 
productions of Charles Brockden Brown, one of our 
earliest American novelists, who merits a higher 
rank in American literature than has been common- 
ly assigned him. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton owes, 
in his earlier novels, much to those of Godwin, and 
Caleb Williams and St. Leon are still read. (As a 

writer, for calmness and strength, for repose and 

[ 
energy combined, Godwin has scarcely a rival in the '\ 

English language, and his style deserves to be 



METHODS OF WORLD-REFORM. 109 

studied by every one who would master the purity, 
elegance, and force of our mother tongue. I know 
no other English writer who, unmoved himself, so 
powerfully moves his readers ; and he is almost the 
only English writer, since Burke's unhappy influence 
on the language, who has written truly classical 
English, or our language according to its real 
genius. 

The work on Political Justice was first published 
in 1792, and was republished in a second edition, 
much modified from the first, in 1794. My edition 
was the second. I have it not now, and have not 
seen it these twenty years, but I remember its con- 
tents very distinctly. It was inspired by the enthu- 
siasm created by the French Revolution of 1789 in 
a large class of the civilized world, and contains 
nearly all the false and dangerous principles of that 
Eevolution, systematically arranged, developed, and 
pushed to their last consequences with a merciless 
logic, and a chasteness, vigor, grace, and elegance of 
language, which I have never seen surpassed. I had 
read this book when quite a lad, but without under- 
standing it ; and I had read it again as a Universal- 



110 THE CONVEKT. 

ist and appropriated many of its ideas. I now read it 
still again as a Socialist^ and I think it has had more 
influence on my mind than any other book, except 
the Scriptures, I have ever read. There is scarcely 
a modern error that it does not contain, and he who 
has mastered it, may regard himself as in possession 
of nearly every error the human mind is capa- 
ble of inventing. It denies as unjust all punishment, 
except restraint from actual violence, and conse- 
quently all capital punishment, and all penitentia- 
ries. The author contends that the only law is jus- 
tice, and justice requires us to treat every man 
according to his intrinsic worth, although he forgets 
to tell us how we are to discover it, and therefore 
that if my neighbor has more intrinsic worth than I, 
I am to love him more, if less, I am to love him less, 
than myself. If his father, mother, sister, brother, 
wife, or child is more worthy than mine, then am I 
to love them more than mine ; if mine are the more 
worthy, then am I to love mine the most. If a rude 
man attacks me and threatens my life, I am to con- 
sider whether his life or mine, upon the whole, is the 
more worthy ; if mine, then I am to defend my life 



METHODS OF WORLD-REFORM. Ill 

at the expense of his, if necessary ; if his^ then I am 
to offer him no resistance^ but let him kill me, if he 
chooses. Marriage, by which two persons pledge 
themselves to love each other exclusively until death 
separates them, is repugnant to justice, for it may 
happen that neither is the most worthy, or if at 
the time of marriage they be so, one or the other, 
or both may cease to be so, long before the death of 
either. There is no magic in that pronoun my^ by 
which I am justified in loving my wife, because she 
is mine. If my neighbor's wife is more worthy than 
mine, I am bound to love her the most. I am to 
love the most worthy, and all are boimd in like 
manner to love her most who is really the most 
worthy of all. It would happen, then, that all would 
be bound to love the most one and the same woman. 
But might not this create rivalries, jealousies, &c. ? 
No, for we could all enjoy her conversation, and any 
thing more could be easily enough arranged. The 
author forgot, and it did not occur to me to ask, how 
all the men of the world were to find out what par- 
ticular woman among all living women is the most 
worthy, or how, in case she is found out, she is to 



112 THE CONVERT. 

entertain them all with, her conversation. Women 
have great facility in the use of the tongue, but it 
would be somewhat difficult for one woman to con- 
verse with a hundred millions of men. 

Godwin did not propose precisely to abolish prop- 
erty, but he laid down the principle that justice de- 
clares the property belongs to him who most needs 
it. Justice is reciprocal. What it is just for me to 
give another, he has a right to demand. If my neigh- 
bor needs what is in^my possession, or some portion 
of it, more than I do, he has the right to take it 
without asking my leave. This doctrine rather 
pleased me, for I had less than my share, and there- 
fore more to gain than to lose by it. In the name 
of justice the autjior denied all schools, especially 
public schools, for they all impose, in some form, the 
opinions of the masters, or through them of the 
parents and guardians, on their pupils. This is con- 
trary to justice. What right have I to impose my 
opinion on another, or to take measures to bring up 
my child or another's in my opinions, religious, 
political, or moral ? Thought is that which is most 
essentially the man, and therefore that in him which 



METHODS OF WORLD-REFOKM. 113 

should be freest. We may urge tlie man or the 
child to think^ but must never tell either what he 
ought to think. This seemed to me so reasonable 
and just, — if the rule of private judgment be adopt- 
ed, — that so long as I remained a Protestant, I took 
good care never to give my own children any reli- 
gious instruction. Parents, Godwin maintained, 
have no more right to control the thoughts or the 
opinions of their own children, than they have the 
children of others. How he managed with his own 
daughter Mary, I know not. He was not married 
when he wrote his book. 

On the same principle that he destroys the fam- 
ily, and all family affections as such, Godwin destroys 
patriotism and the nation. Why should I love my 
country more than another ? Why am I to love any 
thing because it is mine ? Why am I to prefer my 
countryman to a foreigner ? What right have I to 
regard any man as a foreigner ? If my country is in 
the right, I may indeed support her, not because she 
is mine, but because she is in the right. But if in 
the wrong, I may neither defend her nor wish her 
defended. Justice requires me to wish her defeat. 



114 THE CONVEET. 

On this doctrine^ distinct nations cannot exist, and the 
author contends that they ought not to exist. Jus- 
tice breaks down and obliterates all national distinc- 
tions ; and thus at once abolishes all national rival- 
ries and jealousies, and all international wars, by re- 
moving their causes. The author, also, rejects all 
government. All men are equal before the law of 
justice, and no man has the right to govern another. 
For the same reason no number of men, not even the 
majority, have any right to make their will or their 
reason prevail as law. Each man has the sovereignty 
of himself. All government, therefore, whether 
monarchical, aristocratical, democratical, or mixed, is 
founded in injustice, is a usurpation, a tyranny, and 
without authority. 

These principles involve complete individualism, 
and leave every man free to do what seems right in 
his own eyes. The plain, old-fashioned reader, unac- 
quainted with world-reforms, naturally wonders how 
it is that a man of the ability and education of Wil- 
liam Godwin, a man of a sharp intellect, and some 
knowledge of human nature, could ever have fancied 
that mankind could attempt to carry such principles 



METHODS OF WORLD-REFORM. 115 

into practice, without falling into anarchy, and a worse 
than the savage state. It is because he does not 
know all the resources of world-reformers ? He takes 
their plan as something to be adopted by mankind 
as they are, as a piece of new cloth to be sewn on to an 
old garment, and sees at once that they would take 
from the old, and the rent be made worse. But they 
propose an entire new garment, in fact, a recasting 
of the essential nature of man, and they intend to 
introduce all the changes necessary to the successful 
working of their schemes. According to Godwin 
man has no innate instincts, or natural tendencies in 
the way of the reformer, no stubborn natural charac- 
ter that persists through all the modifications intro- 
duced by education or moral and intellectual culture. 
All the vices of individual character, and all the evils 
of society, whence man has become the greatest 
plague aj?d tormentor of his kind, come from without, 
not from within, and are due to civil government. 
Abolish civil government, recognize natural justice as 
the only law of the race, and leave the law to execute 
itself, and you will remove all evils, individual and 
social. Leave men to reason, confide in reason, and 



116 THE CONVERT. 

never attempt to give reason the aid of physical force, 
or think of correcting the mind by inflicting pain on 
the body. Men freed from all unjust restraint, from all 
vexatious interference of authority, finding their rea- 
son respected, and their just rights allowed, will have 
no temptation to rebel, no provocation to encroach on 
any one's rights, and will of themselves fall into their 
proper places, and observe with fidelity all the laws 
of justice. As the experiment has never been tried, 
it is not easy to prove the contrary, and if you adopt 
the doctrine of the inherent integrity of nature, and 
the indefinite perfectibility of man, you cannot deny 
that the scheme has, on one side at least, a certain 
degree of plausibility. There is no doubt that the 
author is right in denying the justice of all govern- 
ment resting on purely human authority, and I have 
never been able to understand how they who deny 
that, though governments are constituted by men, 
they derive their authority to govern immediately 
from God, can deny Godwin's doctrine that all gov- 
ernments are founded in injustice. There is just as 
little doubt that many of the depravities of individ- 
ual character, and many of the evils of society origi- 



METHODS OF WORLD-REFORM. 117 

nate in the effort to govern men by brute force. 
Princes should be shepherds of the people, not dom- 
inators. 

Even the absurdest and most mischievous of God- 
win's principles have a certain reflection of Chris- 
tian truth. His doctrine that we should love the 
most worthy irrespective of their personal relation to 
us, is true in the abstract, and hence we are to forsake 
father and mother, wife and children, houses and 
lands, and even give up our own life for our Lord, for 
God, the infinitely worthy. In a certain sense, the 
proprietor is only a steward, and the surplus of his 
property belongs to the poor ; but Christianity makes 
its distribution an act of charity, not of justice. Mar- 
riage in the Christian sense is really practicable with 
the majority of the non-laboring classes only by the 
grace of the sacrament. For men and women in easy 
circumstances, v/ho are not Christians, but aban- 
doned to simple unassisted nature, it is a burden too 
great to be borne, as the experience of all ages suffi- 
ciently proves. Almighty God under the old law 
dispensed the Jews from many of its rigors, and the 
Protestant Keformers, denying marriage to be a sac- 



118 THE CONVERT. 

rament^ authorized divorce from the bond of matri- 
mony, and in certain cases permitted polygamy. 
Christian marriage is above the strength of human 
nature in our present fallen state, and needs Chris- 
tian grace. It need not surprise us then, that hon- 
est and enlightened men and women, far enough 
themselves from being of a licentious turn, yet igno- 
rant of the Christian faith, and with no knowledge 
of, or belief in the Christian sacraments, should re- 
volt at Catholic marriage, and labor not only to ren- 
der it dissoluble, but easily dissoluble, and for slight, 
even trivial causes. 

But though Godwin had a powerful influence on 
my mind, he did not absolutely master it. I would 
retain my own individuality, but I could not bring 
my mind to believe that all social organization, all 
associated action must be condemned as repugnant 
to justice. Man is social by nature, and he has 
wants which can be met only by the provisions of 
society. Grant that the depravities of individual 
character originate in government, — kingcraft and 
priestcraft ; but in what have these originated ? If 
they are unjust, as you maintain, there must be a 



METHODS OF WORLD-REFORM. 119 

source of injustice prior to them^ and independent of 
them. Then their simple removal will not necessa- 
rily secure the reign of justice. Then how are we to 
remove them by simple individual action ? By sim- 
ple appeals to reason, by simply enlightening the un- 
derstanding ? But is it not a well-known fact that 
prejudice is a bar to enlightenment, and also that 
men are very far from acting always in accordance 
with their convictions of right ? Men know what is 
just, and yet do it not. I find when I would do 
good evil is present with me, and the ^ood I would 
I do not. No : to remove corrupt and corrupting 
governments, to overthrow kingcraft, to abolish 
priestcraft, to free men from superstition, from vain 
hopes and idle terrors, from the effects of false educa- 
tion, unfavorable circumstances, evil influences, the 
prejudices accumulating through long ages of igno- 
rance and barbarism, and to render man the free, the 
noble, majestic being I would have him, I need some- 
thing more than simple individual intelligence, and 
something more than the simple strength of individual 
will. I want and must have a greater than simple 
individual power. For the present, at least, I must 



120 THE CONVERT. 

avail myself of the principle of association, and in- 
stead of sweeping away all organization, must en- 
deavor to perfect social organization^ and use it as a 
means of gaining the end I propose. 

Here I found myself co-operating with the well- 
known Frances Wright, who seemed to me to have 
hit upon a just medium between the individualism of 
Godwin, and the communism of Owen. Frances 
Wright was born in Scotland near the end of the last 
century, and inherited a considerable property. She • 
had been highly educated, and was a woman of rare 
original powers, and extensive and varied informa- 
tion. She was brought up in the utilitarian princi- 
ples of Jeremy Bentham, was often an inmate of the 
family of General Lafayette at La Grange, and in 
the General's suite she visited this country in 1824. 
Keturning to England in 1825, she published a book 
on the United States, in a strain of almost unbounded 
eulogy of the American people and their institutions. 
She saw only one stain upon our character, one thing 
in our condition to censure or to deplore ; — that was 
negro-slavery, which struck her as it does most Eu- 



METHODS OF WORLD-REFORM. 121 

ropeans^ as an anomaly and wholly incompatible with 
our theory of human rights. 

When in the next year Mr. Owen came^ with his 
friends, to commence his experiment of creating a 
new moral world at New Harmony, Frances Wright 
came with him, not as a full believer in his crotchets, 
but to try an experiment, devised with Jefferson, La- 
fayette, and others, for the emancipation of the negro 
slaves. The plan was to make the slaves work out 
the price of their own emancipation, and to prepare 
them, while they were doing it, by a peculiar system 
of training, for freedom. She believed it possible to 
make the labor of the slaves sufficiently profitable to 
support themselves and to remunerate her for the 
price she must pay their owners for them, and 
while they were doing this, by subjecting them to 
the moral and intellectual discipUne of her philo- 
sophical principles, or the system of education she 
proposed to adopt, to render them moral and intel- 
ligent, free and independent in character, in every 
respect the equals of the whites. She accordingly 
purchased a plantation and some negroes at Nashoba 
in the State of Tennessee, about fifteen miles from 
6 



122 THE CONVERT. 

Memphis, and commenced her experiment, which 
failed in less than two years, as she alleged, in conse- 
quence of her own illness for several months, and her 
inability to find persons to manage it, who combined 
the several qualities requisite, on the one hand, for its 
economical management, and on the other, for carry- 
ing out her educational system, or her moral and 
philosophical ideas. Yet it should be mentioned to 
her honor that she gave her slaves their freedom, and 
settled them in Hayti, which was then a republic 
under President Boyer. 

The negro experiment having failed, Fanny en- 
larged her views, and discovered that the people of 
the Uni-t.ed States were not as yet prepared to en- 
gage in earnest for the abolition of slavery, that the 
whites were as much slaves as the blacks, and that 
negro slavery was only a branch of the huge tree of 
evil, which overshadowed the whole land. There was 
little wisdom in wasting one's time and resources in 
the attempt to lop it off while the tree itself was left 
standing. The axe must be laid at the root of the 
tree, and slavery must be abolished only as the re- 



METHODS OF WORLD-REFOKM. 123 

suit of a general emancipation and a radical reform 
of the American people themselves. 

The first step to be taken was to rouse the Amer- 
can mind to a sense of its rights and dignity, to 
emancipate it from superstition, from its subjection 
to the clergy, and its fear of unseen powers, — to with- 
draw it from the contemplation of the stars or an im- 
aginary heaven after death, and fix it on the great and 
glorious work of promoting man's earthly well-being. 
The second step was by political action to get adopted, 
at the earliest practicable moment, a system of state 
schools, in which all the children from two years old 
and upward should be fed, clothed, in a word, main- 
tained, instructed, and educated at the public ex- 
pense. In furtherance of the first object, Fanny pre- 
pared a course of Lectures on Knowledge^ which she 
proposed to deliver in the principal cities and towns 
of the Union. She had acquired a high literary 
reputation, and had still property enough left to 
permit her to go through the country and deliver 
her lectures at her own expense. She thought she 
possessed advantages in the fact that she was a 
woman, for there would for that reason be a greater 



124 THE CONVERT. 

curiosity to hear her, and she would be permitted to 
speak with greater boldness and directness against 
the clergy and superstition than would be one of the 
other sex. 

She commenced delivering her lectures in the 
autumn of 1828, at Cincinnati, and soon produced 
no little excitement. She gave them subsequent- 
ly in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Albany, 
Utica, Auburn, Buffalo, and various other places. 
Her lectures were eminently popular. Her free, 
flowing, and ornate style, — French rather than Eng- 
lish, — her fine, rich, musical voice, highly cultivated 
and possessing great power, her graceful manner, her 
tall, commanding figure, her wit and sarcasm, her 
apparent honesty of purpose, and deep and glowing 
enthusiasm, made her one* of the most pleasing 
and effective orators, man or woman, that I have 
ever heard. The Evangelicals of course were hos- 
tile to her, and said all manner of things against 
her, for the most part untrue, and did all in their 
power, not of course to disprove her doctrine, but to 
render her personally odious. This was particularly 
the case in Auburn, Cayuga Co., N. Y. Auburn 



METHODS OF WORLD-KEFORM. 125 

was then a village containing between three and four 
thousand inhabitants^ divided, as usual in all our vil- 
lages, into a large number of sects. The hard things 
that were said of Fanny came to her ears, and at the 
close of orfe of her lectures, she quietly and in the 
sweetest manner imaginable remarked : 

" We have here this evening considered the sub- 
ject of Keligion. To-morrow evening, at half past 
seven o'clock, we will meet again at this place to dis- 
cuss the subject of Morals. I observed, in driving 
through your beautiful village to-day, the spires of 
six meeting-houses, belonging to as many different 
religious denominations, and I was told that there 
were two or three other denominations that have not 
as yet erected meeting-houses for themselves. It is 
evident that religion must have been well discussed 
among you, and that you are eminently a religious 
people. I have travelled much and visited many 
countries, and in no place have I been so un court- 
eously received, or been the subject of so much 
personal insult, as in your most religious village. 
Perhaps it will not be inappropriate for us to spend 
one evening in discussing the subject of Morals/' 



126 THE CONVERT. 

About the time that she commenced her brief 
career as a pnbhc lecturer on Knowledge, Fanny, in 
connection with Eobert Dale Owen, the eldest son 
of Eobert Owen, and Eobert L. Jennings, a Scotch- 
man, started a weekly journal in New York, called 
The Free Enquirer, converted an old meeting-house 
into a '' Hall of Science,'' and put in operation all 
the machinery of a most vigorous propagandism. 
In 1830 sho revisited France, where she became the 
wife of M. Darusmont, who, as William Phiquepal, 
had been her travelling companion and man of busi- 
ness during her lecturing tours. She was present in 
Paris during the Eevolution of July, and remained 
abroad for several years. She returned, indeed, to 
this country, finally took up her residence in Cincin- 
nati, the wreck of what she was in the days when I 
knew and admired her, and where, not long since, 
deserted by all her former friends, and in poverty, if 
not destitution, she died. The only person, as far 
as I can learn, who did not desert her, but did all 
she could to lighten her afilictions, to soothe her last 
moments, and to direct her mind to the only source 



METHODS OF WOKLD-REFORM. 127 

of help and comfort, was a most estimable lady, a 
convert from Quakerism to Catholicity. 

Poor Fanny ! I have always regretted her fate. 
Her husband treated her, I have understood, with 
great unkindness and brutality. And certain it is, 
that after her marriage her charm was broken, and 
her strength departed from her. Yet few who knew 
her as I did, when she was about thirty years of age, 
still fresh and blooming, with her feminine sweetness 
and grace, and her masculine intellect, however 
they may regard her principles, will fail to remember 
her with much personal kindness. She followed out 
with logical consistency the principle of private 
judgment in faith and morals, and none who recog- 
nize that principle, and deny all infallible teaching, 
have amy right to reproach her. She did great 
harm, and the morals of the American people feel 
even to-day the injury she did them ; but she acted 
according to her lights, and was at least no hypocrite. 
Many who condemn her have been and are greater 
sinners than she. 



CHAPTER VIL 

THE WORKING MEN. 

The great measure on which Fanny and her friends 
relied for ultimate success was the system of pub- 
lic schools^ which, as I have said, were to include the 
maintenance as well as the instruction and educa- 
tion of all the children of the State. These schools 
were intended to deprive as well as to reheve parents 
of all care and responsibility of their children ^fter a 
year or two years of age. It was assumed that 
parents were in general incompetent to train up 
their children in the way they should go, to form 
them with the right sort of characters, tempers, and 
aims, and therefore it was proposed that the State 
should take the whole charge of the children, pro- 
vide proper establishments, and teachers and govern- 



THE WORKING MEN. . 129 

ors for them^ till they should reach the age of 
majority. This would liberate the parents^ and se- 
cure the principal advantages of a community of 
goods. 

The aim was^ on the one hand, to relieve mar- 
riage of its burdens^ and to remove the principal 
reasons for making it indissoluble ; and on the other^ 
to provide for bringing up all children in a rational 
manner^ to be reasonable men and women^ that is^ free 
from superstition^ all belief in God and immortality, 
or regard for the invisible, and make them look upon 
this life as their only life, this earth as their only 
home, and the promotion of their earthly interests 
and enjoyments as their only end. The three great 
enemies to worldly happiness were held to be religion, 
marriage or family, and private property. Once get 
rid of these three institutions, and we may hope soon 
to realize our earthly paradise. For religion we were 
to substitute science, that is, science of the world of 
the five senses only ; for private property, a commu- 
nity of goods ; and for private families, a community 
of wives. No, not a community of wives, for in our 

new moral world there were to be no wives or hus- 
6- 



]^30 'J-'HE CONVERT. 

bands ; there were to be only men and women, wbo 
would be free to cohabit together, according to their 
mutual likings, and for as long a time as they found 
it mutually agreeable, and no longer. Marriage as a 
sacrament, as a sacred thing, as a mystery, making 
of the twain one flesh, was denied as a superstition, 
or an invention of the priests, to render their own 
office so much the more necessary and profitable ; 
but marriage, as the expression of mutual love be- 
tween a man and a woman, was to be recognized. 
Yet as the end of all marriage is mutual happiness, 
and as that results only from mutual love, it follows 
that where the love is wanting the marriage is ille- 
gitimate, is immoral, and should never take place, 
or should cease. 

The great defect of this theory is in the assump- 
tion that the mutual love which is demanded by 
marriage is not within the power of free will, and 
therefore does not depend on the parties themselves. 
The love promised in the marriage contract is not 
love as an uncontrollable sentiment, but love as a 
free, voluntary affection, love in the sense in which 
we are free to love or not to love as we choose. Mar- 



THE WORKING MEN. 131 

riage in the Christian sense is certainly indefensible, 
if we accept the modern theory that love is necessary, 
fatal^ independent of free will. Taking this theory, 
a theory which follows logically from Calvinistic and 
infidel philosophy, and is assumed as undeniable by 
all our modern novelists and romancers, the doctrine 
of Mary Wolstoncroft, William Godwin^ the poet 
Shelley, Eobert Owen, Frances Wright, and the 
advocates of Free Love, is reasonable and just. 
Christian marriage, if that theory be true, is im- 
moral, because no one has a right to promise to do 
what it does not depend on his free will to per- 
form. Christian marriage proceeds on the assump- 
tion that man, with the grace of Gfod, is free to love, 
and can love, and faithfully perform, if he chooses, 
all that is implied in the marriage contract. But 
Calvinism and infidelity alike denying free will in 
fact, even when they do not in name, are obliged to 
reject marriage in the Christian sense, and to be 
consistent must assert what is called Free Love. 

There is no question that the views of matrimony 
taken by Fanny Wright and her school are abomi- 
nable, but it does not necessarily foUow that they 



132 THE CONVEKT. 

were adopted from loose or licentious passions^ or 
from really immoral motives. They were and are 
justified by the theory of love adopted by very nearly 
the whole non-Catholic world. It must not, more- 
over, be assumed that they appeared to us in the 
gross and shocking light that they do to the public 
or even to myself at the present time. Things do 
not always appear to us at twenty-six as they do at 
fifty-four. We saw clearly enough that they were not 
views to be carried into practice in the present state 
of society, and we proposed them to be adopted only 
by a future generation, trained and prepared in our 
system of schools founded and sustained by the pub- 
lic, to adopt without abusing them. In our minds, 
the wonder-working effects of these schools were to 
precede their practical realization. 

Our illusion, after our misapprehension of the 
nature of the love promised in marriage, was the un- 
due estimate we placed on education. Our theory 
was that the child is passive in the hands of the edu- 
cator, and may be moulded as clay in the hands of 
the potter. Yet in this we did but follow the popular 
philosophy of Locke and CondiUac, and draw the 



THE WORKING MEN. 133 

conclusions warranted by the premises supplied us by 
the age and country. The sensism of Locke and the 
utilitarian morals of Paley were then taught in near- 
ly all our colleges and universities. Most of the 
generation to which I belong have been brought up 
to believe that the mind has no inherent character, 
and is in the beginning a mere tabula rasa^ a blank 
sheet, with simply the capacity of receiving the 
characters which may be written on it. It is only 
recently that Locke and Paley have been dethroned 
in our universities, and they are not yet expelled 
from our popular literature. Thirty years ago the 
whole non- Catholic world believed in the power of 
education to redeem society, and to secure the reign 
of truth and justice, and that belief has still many 
a stalwart champion, not precisely of the Fanny 
Wright school. 

Be all this as it may, our dependence was placed 
on education in a system of public schools managed 
after a plan of our own, or rather of William Phique- 
pal, a Frenchman, subsequently the husband of Fanny 
Wright, and who I see has not long since been cast 
in a suit for damages for the neglect and abuse of 



134 THE CONVERT. 

some of the pupils lie brought with him from France 
to this country^ and whom he pretended to educate. 
I know something of his mode of managing with 
these boys ; I knew it from his own lips^ and him I 
never trusted. But the more immediate work was 
to get our system of schools adopted. To this end 
it was proposed to organize the whole Union secretly, 
very much on the plan of the Carbonari of Europe, 
of whom at that time I knew nothing. The mem- 
bers of this secret society were to avail themselves 
of all the means in their power, each in his own lo- 
cality, to form public oj)inion in favor of education 
by the State at the public expense, and to get such 
men elected to the legislatures as would be likely 'to 
favor our purposes. How far the secret organization 
extended I do not know, but I do know that a con- 
siderable portion of the State of New York was or- 
ganized, for I was myself one of the agents for organ- 
izing it. I, however, became tired of the work, and 
abandoned it after a few months. Whether the 
organization still exists, or whether it has ever ex- 
erted any influence or not, is more than I am able 
to say, or have taken the pains to ascertain. 



THE WORKING MEN. 135 

Our next step, and in connection with this, was 
the formation of what was known as the Working 
Men's Party, started in Philadelphia in 1828, and in 
New York in the year following. This party was 
devised and started principally by Eobert Dale 
Owen, Eobert L. Jennings, George H. Evans, and a 
few others, without exception Europeans by birth. 
The purpose in the formation of this party was to 
get control of the political power of the S^ate, so as 
to be able to use it for establishing our system of 
schools. We hoped by linking our cause with the 
ultra-democratic sentiment of the country, which 
had had from the time of Jefferson and Tom Paine 
something of an anti-Christian character, by profess- 
ing ourselves the bold and uncompromising cham- 
pions of equality, by expressing a great love for the 
people, and a deep sympathy with the laborer whom 
we represented as defrauded and oppressed by his 
employer, by denouncing all proprietors as aristo- 
crats, and by keeping the more unpopular features 
of our plan as far in the background as possible, to 
enlist the majority of the American people under 
the banner of the Working Men's Party ; nothing 



136 THE CONVERT. 

doubting that if we could once raise that party to 
power^ we could use it to secure the adoption of our 
educational system. 

Into this party I entered with enthusiasm. I es- 
tablished in Western New York a journal in its sup- 
port^ and co-operated with The Daily Sentinel, con- 
ducted by my friends in the city. But I soon tired 
of the party^ and gave my influence and that of my 
journal^ in the autumn of 1830, to the Jackson can- 
didate^ E. T. Throop, against Frank Granger, the 
candidate of the Anti-masons, for Governor. This 
defection ruined my journal as a party journal, and 
a few days after the election, I disposed of it to my 
partner, and ceased to be its editor. The truth is, 
I never was and never could be a party man, or work 
in the traces of a party. I abandoned, indeed, after 
a year's devotion to it, the Working Men's Party, but 
not the working men's cause, and to that cause I 
have ever been faithful according to my light and 
ability. 

I was not naturally a radical or even inclined to 
radicalism ; but I had a deep sympathy with the 
poorer and more numerous classes. This sympathy 



THE WORKING MEN. 137 

I still have and trust I shall have as long as I live. 
I believed, and still believe, that the rights of labor 
are not sufficiently protected, and that the modem 
system of large industries, which requires for its 
prosecution heavy outlays of capital — or credit, 
makes the great mass of operatives virtually slaves, 
slaves, in all except the name, as much so as are the 
negroes on one of our Southern plantations. It is a 
system which places the laborer under all the disad- 
vantages without securing him the advantages of 
freedom. I looked, and still look, upon democracy 
as it is called, which has its expression in universal 
suffrage and eligibility, as affording no adequate pro- 
tection to the laboring classes, as in fact no better 
than a mockery. The British system, the mercan- 
tile system, the credit system, the Banking system, 
the system which gives the supremacy to trade and 
manufactures, inaugurated by the Peace of Utrecht 
in 1713, I regarded, and still regard, as worse than 
the serfdom of the middle ages, and worse even than 
slavery as it has existed or can exist in any Christian 
country. It cannot last forever ; but it is too power- 
ful to be successfully combated at present. The 



138 THE CONVERT. 

industrial and commercial supremacy of Great Bri- 
tain must be annihilated before we can get rid of it, 
and that supremacy is not easily shaken, for Eussia 
is the only modern nation that is in a condition to 
offer it the slightest resistance, and Eussia is pre- 
paring to adopt it. 

// My few months' experience as the editor of a 
working man's journal satisfied me that it was idle 
to attempt to carry out our plans by means of a 
working man's party, or, so to speak, a proletarian 
party. The working men, except in the cities and 
manufacturing villages, do not, in our own country, 
constitute, as a distinct class, the majority. They 
are neither numerous nor strong enough to get or to 
wield the political power of the State. They can- 
not afford to engage in the struggle to obtain it. 
Capital or credit in its various forms and ramifica- 
tions is too strong for them. The movement we 
commenced could only excite a war of man against 
money, and all history and all reasoning in the case 
prove that in such a war money carries it over man. 
Money commands the supplies, and can hold out longer 
than they who have nothing but their manhood. It 



THE WORKING MEN. 139 

can starve them into submission. I wished sincerely 
and earnestly to benefit the working men, but I 
saw, as soon as I directed my attention to the point, 
that I could effect nothing by appealing to them as 
a separate class. My policy must be not a work- 
ing men's party, but to induce all classes of socie- 
ty to co-operate in efforts for the working men's 
cause. The rich and poor, the learned and unlearn- 
ed, the producers and consumers, the headworkers 
and the handworkers, must unite, work together, or 
no reforms were practicable, no amelioration of the 
condition of any class was to be hoped for. 

No doubt I was for a moment fascinated by the 
visionary schemes of my friends, but my motive for 
supporting the Working Men's Party was never pre- 
cisely theirs. I did not do it merely for thf sake 
of the proposed system of education, but with the 
hope of benefiting the working men themselves. I 
acquiesced in that system of education for a mo- 
ment, but never really approved it. I was a hus- 
band and a father, and did not altogether relish the 
idea of breaking up the family, and regarding my 
children as belong to the State rather than to me. 



140 THE CONVEET. 

Parents miglit not be in all cases well qualified to 
bring up their children properly, but where was the 
State to get its army of nurses, teachers, governors, 
&c., better qualified? What certainty was there 
that these public schools would be better conducted 
or be more favorable to the morals and intelligence 
of children than the family itself? After all, what, 
could these schools do for our children ? They would 
bring them up to be rational, it was said ; that is, 
free from superstition, free from all religious preju- 
dices, ignorant of all morality resting for its founda- 
tion on belief in God, in immortality, in moral ac- 
countability, and restricted in all their thoughts and 
affections to their five senses and the material 
world, therefore to purely material goods and sensual 
pleasures. Suppose the schools to fulfil these ex- 
pectations they will turn out our children only well- 
trained animals, — a sort of learned pigs. After all, 
is this desirable ? 

I cannot carry out my reforms without love, dis- 
interestedness, sacrifice. If man is a mere animal, 
born to propagate his species, and to die and be no 
more, why shall 1 love him, and sacrifice myself 



THE WORKING MEN. 141 

for him ? Where is his moral worth, his dignity, the 
greatness and majesty of his nature ? What mat- 
ters it, whether, during his existence of a day, he is 
happy or miserable, since to-morrow he dies, and it 
is all the same ? For a being so worthless wherefore 
devote myself ? What is there in him to inspire 
me with heroism, and enable me in his behalf to 
dare poverty, reproach, exile, the rack, the dun- 
geon, the scaffold, or the stake ? 

No longer irritated against religion by being 
obliged by my profession to seem to profess what I 
did not believe, I found myself almost instantly 
reverting with regret to my early religious principles 
and affections. The moment I avowedly threw off 
all religion and began to work without it, I found 
myself impotent. I did not need religion to pull 
down or destroy society, but the moment I wished 
to build up, to effect something positive, I found I 
could not proceed a single step without it. I was 
compelled to make brick without straw. Philoso- 
phers had told me, and I had believed that seK-in- 
terest would suffice as a motive power, that all one 
has to do is to show men what is really for their in- 



142 THE CONVERT. 

terest and they will do it. Nothing more false. 
Men are selfish enough^ no doubt of that ; but no- 
thing in the world is harder than to get them to labor 
for their own best interest. They act from habit, 
from routine, from appetite and passion, and will 
sacrifice their highest and best good to their momen- 
tary lusts. It is an old complaint, that men do not 
act as well as they know. They see the right, ap- 
prove it, and yet pursue the wrong. It is not enough 
to show them their interest, to convince their un- 
derstandings. I must have some power by which I 
can overcome what religious people call the flesh, a 
power which will strengthen the will, and enable 
men to subdue their passions, and control their 
lusts. Where am I to find this power, except in 
religious ideas and principles, in the belief in God 
and immortality, in duty, moral accountability ? 

I need then religion of some sort as the agent 
to induce men to make the sacrifices required in the 
adoption of my plans for working out the reform of so- 
ciety, and securing to man his earthly felicity. Cer- 
tainly, I was far enough from the Christian thought, 
but this conviction, real and sincere, was a step in 



THE WORKING MEN. 143 

my ascent from the abyss into which I had fallen. 
Certainly, it does not follow that religion is true be- 
cause it is needed to secure man his earthly well- 
being, but the conviction that it is necessary for 
that purpose, if not rudely treated, may, in an in- 
genuous mind, lead to something more. I had fixed 
it in my mind, that the creation of an earthly para- 
dise, a heaven on earth for my race, was the end for 
which I should labor, and I saw that I could not 
gain that end without the agency of religion. There- 
fore I accepted religion once more, and on quitting 
my journal, resumed my old profession of a preacher, 
though of what particular Gospel it would be diffi- 
cult to say. 



CHAPTER VIIL 



RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 



/ I RESUMED preaching, but on my own hook, as an 
) independent preacher, responsible to no church, sect, 
or denomination. Do you say I was wrong, that I acted 
precipitately, and should have waited till my beard 
had grown ? Perhaps you are right. But perhaps I 
was not in a condition in which I could wait. A man 
may often be placed in a situation in which he must 
act, although perfectly aware that to act is prema- 
ture. I was still young, only just entering my 
twenty-eighth year, and knew perfectly well that I 
had made no thorough examination of the great 
questions which had been raised in my mind ; but I 
must do sometliing, not indeed what I would, but 
what I could. The question with me was simply 



RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 145 

/what in my condition was practicable, and whether 
what to me was practicable was honest, such as in- 
volved the violation of no principle of natural mo- 
rality. Satisfied on this point, I could resume my 
profession with a good conscience, provided I pre- 
; tended to believe no more than I really did believe, 
\ and did not attempt to dogmatize in matters of 
opinion, or give myself out for what I was not. 

" But you ran without being sent/' Certainly 
I did ; but that was my privilege as a Protestant ? 
No Protestant had or has a right to upbraid me, for 
all Protestant ministers run without being sent. 
None of them have received, in the ecclesiastical 
sense, a mission. I stood on the same footing with 
Luther, Calvin, and all the Keformers. They were 
all preachers on their own hook, self-commissioned 
ministers. I could be no more bound by them than 
they were by the Pope ; or by any Protestant sect, 
than that sect itself was bound by the Catholic 
Church from which it had separated. 

Do you allege that my creed was unorthodox ? 
What standard of orthodoxy had I as a Protestant ? 

The Bible ? The Bible as each one understands it 

« 

7 



146 THE CONVERT. 

for himself, or as it is interpreted by a divinely com- 
missioned authority ? The essence of Protestantism 
is, in denying all such authority, and in asserting 
the right of private interpretation. On Protestant 
principles, orthodoxy is my doxy, heterodoxy is your 
doxy. For the Protestant each man's private 
judgment is the only admissible standard of ortho- 
doxy. Leave me then to follow what seems right in 
Hiy own eyes, or else go back yourselves to Mother 
Church ; prove to me that your private judgment 
is more worthy to be followed than mine, before you 
arraign me as heterodox because I do not foUow it. 
You differ from me as much as I do from you, and 
why is it heterodoxy for me to differ from you, any 
more than it is for you to differ from me ? 

My creed, no doubt, was very short, but no Prot- 
estant had any right to snub me because it was not 
longer. In resuming my profession, I acted as a con- 
sistent Protestant, and as I had already been set apart 
to the work of the ministry by the laying on of the 
hands of a Protestant presbytery, I stood as legiti- 
mately in the pulpit as any Protestant minister does 
or can. So far I was irreproachable on Protestant 



RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 147 

principles. I will say this much, for myself^ that never 
did I, after reascending the pnlpit, profess to be what 
I was not. I never claimed to he an authorized 
preacher, or to have authority to dogmatize on any 
subject. I never pretended to be a doctor. I pro- 
fessed to be only an humble inquirer after truth, and 
all I professed to do was to stimulate my hearers also 
to inquire after it for themselves. I warned them 
that I was a fallible man, and that they must believe 
nothing simply because I believed or asserted it. 
There is, my brethren, I said to them, more truth than 
we have yet found. Even what truth we really do 
hold may be modified as we discover more truth. As 
yet we are learners and inquirers, and we must in- 
quire earnestly for the truth, and hold ourselves ready 
to embrace it, let it come in what shape it may, and 
follow it, let it lead whithersoever it will. 

I have never reproached myself for the position I 
assumed after my connection with Fanny- Wrightism. 
I followed the best light I had, honestly, sincerely, 
unflinchingly, God gave me this grace, and he 
finally led me, without my foreseeing whither he was 
leading me, into the bosom of his Church. Yet when 



148 THE CONVERT. 

I recommenced preacliing I had hardly the simplest 
elements of natural religion. My great aim was not 
to serve God, but to serve man ; the love of my race, 
not the love of my Maker, moved me. I was still 
bent on social reform, and regarded religion and all 
things else solely in relation to that end. I found in 
me certain religious sentiments that I could not ef- 
face, certain religious beliefs or tendencies of which 
I could not divest myself. I regarded them as a law 
of my nature, as natural to man, as the noblest part 
of our nature, and as such I cherished them ; but as 
the expression in me of an objective world, I seldom 
pondered them. I found them universal, mani- 
festing themselves, in some form, wherever man is 
found ; but I received them, or supposed I received 
them, on the authority of humanity or human nature, 
and professed to hold no religion except that of hu- 
manity. I had become a believer in humanity, and 
put humanity in the place of God. The only God I 
recognized was the Divine in man, the divinity of 
humanity, one alike with God and with man, which 
I supposed to be the real meaning of the Christian 
doctrine of the Incarnation, the mystery of Emanuel 



RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 149 

or God with us, God manifest in the flesh. There 
may be an unmanifested God, and certainly is, but 
the only God who exists for us is the God in man, 
the active and living principle of human nature. 

I regarded Jesus Christ as divine in the sense in 
which all men are divine, and human in the sense m 
which all men are human. I took him as my model 
man, and regarded him as a moral and social re- 
former, who sought by teaching the truth under a 
religious envelope, and practising the highest and 
purest morality, to meliorate the earthly condition of 
mankind ; but I saw nothing miraculous in his con- 
ception, or birth, nothing supernatural in his person 
and character, in his life or his doctrine. He came 
to redeem the world as does every great and good 
man, and deserved to be held in universal honor and 
esteem as one who remained firm to the truth amid 
every trial, and finally died on the cross, a martyr to 
his love of mankind. As a social reformer, as one 
devoted to the progress and well-being of man in 
this world, I thought I might liken myself to him, 
and call myself by his name. I called myself a 
Christian^ not because I took him for my master, not 



150 THE CONVERT. 

because I believed all he believed or taught, but be- 
cause, like him, I was laboring to introduce a new 
order of things, and to promote the happiness of my 
Mnd. I used the Bible as a good Protestant, took 
what could be accommodated to my purpose, and 
passed over the rest, as belonging to an age now hap- 
pily outgrown. I followed the example of the carnal 
Jews, and gave an earthly sense to all the promises 
and prophecies of the Messias, and looked for my 
reward in this world. 

^- For several months I went on preaching very 
much as I had lectured during the time of my avowed 
unbelief. Very little was changed except my tone and 
temper. I was willing to agree with the Christian 
world as far as I could, and no longer wished to fight it. 
But I found myself gradually, I hardly know how or 
wherefore, cherishing views and feelings more and 
more in accordance, I will not say with Christianity, 
but with natural rehgion. I began to approximate 
to a belief in God as a creator and moral governor, 
not so much from any reasoning on the subject, as 
from the silent operations of my natural religious 
sentiments. I fell in with a sermon by the celebrated 



RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 151 

Dr. Channing on the Dignity of Human Nature. Its 
eloquence, its noble sentiments, and its elevated 
thoughts, aflfected me powerfully, and made me al- 
most a worshipper of man. It made me think so 
highly of man, of his deathless energies and glorious 
afl&nities, that I felt contented to believe that his 
soul could not die, but must Kve forever. I saw in 
man more clearly and more vividly than I had before, 
something worth living for, something one could love^ 
and if need be die for ; I found myself almost in- 
stantly abandoning my old doctrine of interested for 
disinterested affection. There was something higher 
and nobler in man than I had hitherto admitted, 
something which could serve as a basis to that love 
of mankind necessary as the agent for introducing the 
social changes and organizations through which I 
hoped to obtain my earthly paradise. 

Dr. Channing's writings drew my attention to 
the Unitarians, a denomination with which I had 
•previously had no acquaintance. I found that they 
were liberal, that they eschewed all creeds and con- 
fessions, allowed the unrestrained exercise of reason, 
and left their ministers each to stand on his own pri- 



152 THE CONVERT. 

vate convictions, and to arrange matters each as best 
he could with his own congregation. The few mem- 
bers I met were educated, cultivated, intelligent, re- 
spectable, and I felt that among them I should find 
my home, and my natural associates. I offered my- 
self to a Unitarian congregation in the summer of 
1832, and was accepted and settled as their minis- 
ter. Then almost for the first time I began to study 
philosophy and. theology mth a Httle method and 
earnestness. I was thrown into a society new to me, 
and had access to a whole literature to which I had 
hitherto been a stranger. I learned French and a 
little German, and began the study of the rational- 
istic literatures of France and Grermany, more espe- 
cially of France. A new world, or rather many new 
worlds, seemed to open to me, and I almost forgot my 
socialistic dreams. 

The first work I read in French, and which held 
me enchained quite too long, was a work, forgotten 
now, of Benjamin Constant on Eeligion, considered in 
its Origin, its Forms, and its Developments. It 
chimed in with my modes of thinking at the time, 
and seemed to be just the book I wanted to enable 



RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 153 

me to clear up, develop, systematize, and confirm 
with the requisite historical proofs my own convic- 
tions. Benjamin Constant is a historical character. 
He was born in Switzerland of a French Huguenot 
family, and educated in Geneva, Scotland, and Ger- 
many. He was recognized as a French citizen under 
the Directory, and for several years played a prom- 
inent part as a French politician. Accompanying 
Madame Stael when the First Consul exiled her from 
Paris, travelling with her in Italy, Germany, and 
England, and residing with her for some time at Cop- 
pet, he devoted himself to literature, till the fall of 
Napoleon in 18 1 4. He was admitted to the Council of 
the Emperor during the Hundred Days, and after 
the second Restoration, became a distinguished mem- 
ber of the Chamber of Deputies, on the Liberal side, 
and took an active part in French politics till his 
death in 1832. 

Benjamin Constant had been brought up a Prot- 
estant, and became, like so many others of his gen- 
eration, an unbeliever in revelation, perhaps even in 
God, and is said not to have lived a very edifying life. 

He commenced his work with the intention of direct- 

7^^ 



154 THE CONVERT. 

ing it against religion ; but lie was forced by his in- 
quiries and discoveries to write, as lie believed, in its 
favor. His theory, not peculiar to himself, and held 
by men far profounder and more erudite than he, is 
that religion has its origin in a sentiment natural to 
man, which may be termed a law of his nature. This 
sentiment is vague and not easily defined. It is that 
in man which places him in relation with the unseen, 
mates him tremble before the invisible with fear, or 
thrill with delight, and leads him to open some 
means of communication with supernal powers. 
I / This sentiment is universal, an instinct, or, it may 
be, a mysterious revelation made by the Invisible to 
the heart of man, which finds its natural expres- 
sion in the act of worship. But blind in itself, the 
object worshipped will be proportioned to the degree 
of intellectual light possessed by the worshipper. 
The form depends on the intelligence, and the senti- 
ment adapts itself to any form from the lowest Afri- 
can Fetichism to the highest and purest Jewish and 
Christian Monotheism. The sentiment itself is always 
the same, as unalterable and permanent as the na- 
ture of man, but its forms are variable and transitory. 



RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 155 

Man embodies in them his ideas or conceptions of the 
true, the just, the holy ; but as these ideas are pro- 
gressive, he is obliged with each step in their pro- 
gress to break his old forms become too strait for him, 
and to create new and broader forms, more in har- 
mony with his advancing intelligence. Men began, 
in the lowest forms of Fetichism, with the worship 
of wood, stones, animals, four-footed beasts, and creep- 
ing things. From Fetichism they advanced in 
process of time to the worship of the sun, moon, and 
stars, or the hosts of heaven, and the elements of 
nature. At first man worships the outward, visible 
object itself, but gradually refining on the object, and 
rising to metaphysical conceptions, he talj:es it simply 
as a symbol of the invisible, and worships no longer 
the bull, but the spirit or manitou of the bull, — no 
longer the sun, but the spirit of the sun. In this 
way he rises from Sabeanism to Oriental, Egyptian, 
and Persian symbolism, and to the polished and 
graceful forms of Greek and Koman Polytheism. 
Eefining and philosophizing still more on his ideas 
and the phenomena of nature, he ascends to the Jew- 



156 THE CONVERT. 

ish, and from the Jewish to the Christian Mon- 
otheism. 

Man's natural tendency is to embody his ideas 
and sentiments in fixed forms or institutions. He 
wishes to find to-day the friends of yesterday. He 
dreads change, and would render his acquisitions 
permanent and unchangeable. The jugglers, after- 
wards developed into a priesthood, take advantage of 
this, and labor to keep the forms of religion fixed 
and stationary, and to prevent all religious progress, 
all growth or expansion of religious ideas. This is 
especially the case in the East, where the sacerdotal 
religions obtain and give to society a theocratic organ- 
ization and government. Originally the sacerdotal 
rehgions obtained even in Greece and Eome, but 
gradually the warrior caste emancipated themselves 
from the sacerdotal, established civil governments 
proper, and obtained for religion the freedom to fol- 
low the natural progress and development of the na- 
tion. There is a great progress in the' moral and re- 
ligious ideas of the Odyssey on those of the Iliad, and 
hence the two poems could never have been com- 
posed by one and the same man. The Koman Poly- 



RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 157 

theism, again, is far in advance of the Grecian. In- 
deed Christianity is only one step in advance of Ko- 
man Polytheism, a step to which the human mind 
naturally tended. 

Each new form or institution of religion is not 
only an advance on its predecessor, but is the step- 
ping stone to newer and still greater progress. 
Each in turn is outgrown, ceases to be in harmony 
with the wants and intelligence of the age. or coun- 
try ; and when it becomes so, men begin to criticize 
it, to point out its defects, its inconsistencies, and to 
break away from it. Do not be alarmed. These 
critical periods in history are no doubt terrible, such 
as one dreads to live in, but they are essential to the 
progress of man and society. People think religion 
is about to desert them, and they look upon the ad- 
vanced minds longing for something purer, higher, 
truer, and broader, as their enemies, as the enemies 
of the gods, as infidels, blasphemers, and condemn 
them to drink hemlock, or to be crucified between 
two thieves. Such periods of criticism^ of destruc- 
tion of old forms, have occurred several times in the 
history of the human race. We meet one in Greece 



158 THE CONVERT. 

commenced by Socrates and continued by Plato ; 
another which prepared the way for the introduction 
and establishment of the Christian Church ; another 
which commenced in the sixteenth century of our era, 
when Catholicity had ceased to be in harmony with 
the wants and intelligence of the age^ and which 
still continues. These periods of destruction and 
transition mark not the decline of civihzation, but 
its advance^ and so far from being hostile to reli- 
gion, they invariably prepare for it a more glorious 
future. 

This theory of the progress of religion corre- 
sponded with my theory of the progress of mankind, 
and had for me many charms. I was prepared in 
advance to accept it, and did not at the time think 
of inquiring whether it really had any historical 
basis or not. No doubt had as yet arisen in my 
mind as to the truth of the doctrine of progress. A 
slight knowledge of history, as w^ell as of philosophy, 
suffices to refute Benjamin Constant's theory. Truth 
is older than error, and Monotheism — the belief and 
worship of one only God— is older than Polytheism, 
older than Fetichism, and is, in fact, the earliest form 



RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 159 

of religion recorded in history. But the truth or 
falsity of the theory under this relation was not the 
point which struck me with the most force. That 
was not the problem which I was interested at 
the time in solving. The point in the theory which 
struck my attention, and influenced my studies and 
action, was the fact alleged, that man naturally 
seeks to embody his religious ideas and sentiments 
in institutions, and that these institutions serve as 
instruments of progress. What we now want, I 
said, is a new religious institution or church, one 
that shall embody the advanced intelligence of the 
age, and respond to all the new wants which time 
and events have developed. Every institution, in 
that it is an institution, has something fixed, inflex- 
ible, and inexpansive. Hence no institution can 
answer the wants of the race in all times and places. 
The various religions, Fetichism, Sabeanism, Sym- 
bolism, Polytheism, Judaism, Catholicism, have all 
been good and useful in their day, when and where 
they harmonized with the wants and intelligence of 
the people ; but they have all been outgrown, and 
the human race has cast them off, as the grown man 



160 THE CONVEBT. 

casts off the garments of his childhood. / Catho- 
licity was good in its day, during the thousand years 
which intervened between the fall of the Koman 
Empire of the West and the rise of Luther^ 
and his associates ; for during that period it was in 
harmony with the general intelligence, responded to \ 
the highest conceptions^ and to the deepest wants of; 
the soul then developed. It led the age, command^ 
ed respect, commanded obedience and love, becausel^ 
it aided the soul in its progress, inspired the heart ! 
with noble sentiments, and prepared its adherents 
to engage in grand and heroic enterprises for the 
human race. But fixed and inflexible, immovable 
and unalterable in itself, it ceased to be favorable to 
progress the moment it had brought the race up to 
its own level, and must from that moment become 
a let and a hinderance to progress, — a mischievous 
institution, which must be demolished and cleared . 
away to make, room for a new and better institu- / 
tion.y 

^^'That Catholicity had been outgrown and ceased 
to be useful, was evinced by the Keformation. Pro- 
testantism was not a religion, was not a church, and 



RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 161^ 

I in itself contained no germ of religious organiza- 
tion. It was not in any sense an institution. Its 
mission was simply one of destruction^ as I wrote in 
The Christian Examiner ^ in 1834. But its rise 
proved that there were wants and lights which 
Catholicity did not meet, — could not satisfy. What, 
then, is our mission ? Not to revive Catholicity, al- 
ready become superannuated in the sixteenth cen- 
tury, and struck with death by Luther, when he 
threw his inkstand in the face of the devil ; not to 
continue Protestantism, which was simply critical, 
destructive, and without the slightest organic char- 
acter or tendency, or the least power to erect a tem- 
ple of concord and peace, of union and progress. 
What then ? It is to labor directly for a new 
religious institution, church, or organization, which 
: shall embody the most advanced ideas and senti- 
j ments of the race, and be The Church of the 
j Future, by containing in itself what was wanting 
j in the religions of the past, — the' principle of its 
Vown progress. 



CHAPTER IX. 



UNION AND PEOGRESS. 



I DID not lose siglit of the great end I proposed — 
the progress of man and society, and the reaKzation 
of a heaven on earth. I was working in reference 
to it even while I was pursuing my historical and 
philosophical researches, and maturing my religious 
theories. I had been forced to resort to religious 
ideas and sentiments for the power to work effect- 
ually for it ; and I now found that I must have a 
religious organization, institution, or church, in order 
to render these sentiments practically efficient. This 
much I had gained from Benjamin Constant's great 
work, and it was nearly all that I did gain from it. 
The work of destruction commenced by the Refor- 
mation, which had introduced an era of criticism 



UNION AND PROGRESS. 163 

and revolution, liad, I thought, been carried far 
enough. All that was dissoluble had been dissolved. 
All that was destructible had been destroyed, and it 
was time to begin the work of reconstruction, — a 
work of reconciliation and love. 

Irreligious ideas and sentiments are disorganiz- 
ing and destructive in their nature, and cannot be 
safely cherished for a single moment after the work 
of destruction is completed. When the work to be 
done is that of construction, of building up, of or- 
ganizing, of founding something, we must resort to 
rehgious ideas and sentiments, for they having love 
for their principle are plastic, organic, constructive, 
and the only ideas and sentiments that are so. They 
are necessary to the new organization or institution 
of the race demanded, and the organization or in- 
stitution, what I called the church, is necessary 
to the progress of man and society, or the creation 
of an earthly paradise. The first thing to be done is 
to cease our hostility to the past, discontinue the 
work of destruction, abandon the old war against the 
Papacy, which has no longer any significance, and 
in a spirit of universal love and conciliation, turn 



164 THE CONVERT. 

onr attention to the work of founding a religious in- 
stitution^ or effecting a new church organization, 
adapted to our present and future wants. 

This we are now^ I thought^ in a condition to 
attempt. Men are beginning to understand ttat 
Protestantism is no-churchism^ is no positive religion^ 
and while it serves the purpose of criticism and 
destruction^ it cannot meet the wants of the soul, 
or erect the temple in which the human race may 
assemble to worship in concord and peace. Unita- 
rianism has demolished Calvinismj made an end in 
all thinking minds of every thing like dogmatic 
Protestantism, and Unitarianism itself satisfies no- 
body. It is negative, cold, lifeless, and all advanced 
minds among Unitarians are dissatisfied with it, 
and are craving something higher, better, more liv- 
ing, and lifegiving. They are weary of doubt, un- 
certainty, disunion, individualism, and crying out 
from the bottom of their hearts for faith, for love, 
for union. They feel that life has well-nigh depart- 
ed from the world ; that religion is but an empty 
name, and morality is mere decorum or worldly pru- 
dence ; that men neither worship God nor love one 



UNION AND PROGRESS. 165 

another. Society as it is, is a lie, a sham, a charnel- 
house, a valley of dry bones. that the Spirit of 
God would once more pass by and say unto these 
dry bones, '^ Live." So I felt, so felt others, and 
whoever enjoyed the confidence of the leading Uni- 
tarian ministers in Boston and its vicinity from 1830 
to 1840, well know that they were sick at heart with 
what they had, and were demanding in their interior 
souls a religious institution of some sort, in which 
they could find shelter from the storms of this win- 
try world, and some crumbs of the bread of life to 
keep them from starving. Not only in Boston was 
this cry heard. It came to us on every wind from 
all quarters,— from France, from Germany, from 
England even, and Carlyle in his Sartor Resartus 
seemed to lay his finger on the plague-spot of the 
age. Men had reached the centre of indifference, 
under a broiling sun in the Bue d'Enfer, had pro- 
nounced the everlasting " No/' Were they never 
to be able to pronounce the everlasting '' Yes ? '' 

Among them all I was probably the most hope- 
ful, and the most disposed to act. If I lacked faith 
in God, I had faith in humanity. The criticisms 



166 THE CONVEKT. 

on all subjects sacred and profane, the bold investi- 
gations of every department of life, continued un- 
weariedly for three hundred years, by the most in- 
trepid, the most energetic, and the most enlightened 
portion of mankind, had, I thought, sufficiently de- 
veloped ideas and sentiments, and obtained for us 
all the light needed, all the materials wanted for 
commencing the work of reorganization, and casting 
broad and deep the foundations of the Church of 
the Future. All that was wanting was to collect 
the ideas which these three hundred years of criti- 
cism and investigation had developed, and mould 
them into one harmonious, complete, and living sys- 
tem, and then to take that system as the principle 
and law of the new moral and religious organiza- 
tion. Whence that system, formed from the union 
of various and isolated ideas, was to derive its 
life, its principle of unity and vitality, so as to be 
living and effective, I did not at the time specially 
consider. I supposed ideas themselves were potent, 
but hard pressed, I probably should have said, they 
are potent by the potency of the human mind, or 
the- Divinity in man. 



UNION AND PROGRESS. 167 

^ ^ There was a moment when I looked to Dr. Chan- 
/ning, the foremost man among the Unitarians, as 
the one who was to take the lead in this work of 
reorganization. His reputation in 1834 was high, 
and he loomed up at a distance in my eyes as the 
great man of the age ; but a closer view, an intimate 
personal acquaintance with him, soon disabused me. 
Dr. Channing had done me great service in the be- 
ginning of my efforts to rise from the abyss of un- 
belief into which I had fallen ; he was my warm, 
considerate, and steady friend ever after to the day of 
his death. He consoled me, encouraged me, aided 
me in various ways ; and I can never forget my 
personal obligations to him. I hold, and always 
shall hold, his memory in grateful respect. But he 
\ was not the great man many supposed him to be. 
He was benevolent, philanthropic, and anxious to do 
all in his power for the good of mankind, especially 
for the relief of the poorer and more numerous classes. 
He had a just horror of Calvinistic theology, and 
I warred to the last against the Calvinistic view of 
I human nature. He rejected with indignation the 
doctrine of total depravity, asserted in eloquent 



168 THE CONVERT. 

terms the dignity of human nature, and entertained 
the loftiest conceptions of the greatness and capacity 
of the human soul. He asserted so frequently and 
so strongly the dignity of man, that one of his 
brother ministers said of him, with more point than 
truth, however, " Dr. Channing makes man a great 
God, and God a little man/' He certainly, in re- 
volting against the Calvinistic doctrine, which so 
imduly depresses the human to make way, as it 
supposes, for sovereign grace, ran to the opposite 
extreme, and as unduly depressed the Divine, and 
exaggerated the human. He is answerable for no 
small portion of the soul- worship, which was for a 
time the fashionable idolatry of the metropolis of 
New England. 

As a moral man, as a lover of his kind, as a 
sympathizer with the oppressed and the downtrod- 
, den. Dr. Channing was great, bat he was never a 
\ clear and profound thinker. He was no philosopher, 
^no theologian, and only moderately erudite. As a 
reasoner he was feeble and confused ; as a controver- 
sialist, he was no match for the Worcesters, Woods, 
and Stuarts in the ranks of his Calvinistic opponents. 



UNION AND PROGRESS. 169 

1 He was undoubtedly an eloquent sermonizer, and 
f within his range the master of a style of great sim- 
plicity, sweetness, and beauty ; but he lacked vigor 
and robustness, and left on his readers the impres- 
sion that he was sickly and inclining to sentiment- 
alism. He was an eloquent and effective declaimer, 
and was felicitous, when the matter did not lie be- 
yond his depth, in summing up and clearly stating 
the various points in a question after it had been 
, thoroughly discussed by more vigorous and original, 
but less polished and graceful minds than his own. 
He was never, to my knowledge, a leader in the 

world of thought or of action, and his study ap- 

i 

j parently was to come after others, and to rebuke or 

applaud them as seemed to him proper ; and as he 

usually chose his time for intervening with adroit- 

) ness, he not unfrequently received the credit due to 

^ those who had gone before and enlightened him. 

Dr. Channing exerted for a long time a very 
great influence, and he did, no doubt, good service in 
demolishing New England theology, and in liberal- 
izing the New England mind ; but he had no original 
genius or tendency. His nature was not expansive 
8 



170 THE CONVERT. 

and with, all his generous sentiment he lived as it 
were shut up in himself. He inclined strongly to 
individualism, and distrusted all associated action, 
though sometimes tolerating, and even encouraging 
it. His sympathy with Unitarians, as a distinct 
sect or denomination, was not strong, and he gave 
them the prestige of his name chiefly because they 
suffered reproach. TJnitarianism he regarded as use- 
ful in that it was opposed to Calvinism ; but he was far 
from regarding it as the last word of Christian truth. 
His own mind, I apprehend, remained unsettled to 
the day of his death. He felt that he was still seeking 
after the truth, and waiting for it to dawn on him and 
the world. '^ There is,^' he would often say in his 
conversations with me, '' a higher form of Christian 
truth and love needed and to be revealed than the 
world has yet seen, and I look with hope to the dis- 
cussions and movements in the midst of which we 
live to elicit and realize it for mankind."" He looked 
for this new manifestation of Christian truth and love 
in a socialist direction. I do not think he had any 
tendency to return towards New England orthodoxy, 
in which he was educated, as some Evangelicals have 



UNION AND PROGRESS. l7l 

supposed. As far as I could discover, his tendency 
in the latter years of his life was to place less and 
less value on doctrines of any sort, and to make re- 
ligion consist in sentiment alone. He rejected all 
creeds and confessions, rejected all church authority, 
and all church organization, though he died a mem- 
ber of the Church of the Disciples, founded by James 
Freeman Clarke, on the principle that true Chris- 
tians are they who exclude no views, whether true or 
false, and are ever learning, and never able to come 
to the knowledge of the truth. 

Dr. Channing was not and could not be the man 
to found the new order, and rival or more than rival a 
Moses and a greater than Moses. Among my friends 
and acquaintances I found none. Perhaps the 
thought passed through my head that I was myself 
the destined man, but I did not entertain it. I could 
not be more than John the Baptist, or the Voice of 
one crying in the wilderness, " Behold the Lord 
Cometh ; prepare ye to meet him.^' I might per- 
haps be the Precursor of the new Messias, but not 
the new Messias himself My business was not to 
found the new church, but to proclaim its necessity, 



172 THE CONVERT. 

and to prepare men's minds and hearts to wel- 
come it. 

You smile at my simplicity or at my lofty esti- 
mate of myself, but with less justice than you sup- 
pose. I was a believer in humanity, and the God I 
professed to worship was the God in man. I was 
with the Unitarians, and had not advanced nearer to 
Christianity than they were, most of them thought 
not so near. But the New England Unitarians, 
though very excellent people as the world goes, hold 
nothing that made me appear absurd or ridiculous in 
thinking as I did. They are the descendants of the 
New England Arminians of the last century, who re- 
jected the Calvinistic doctrine of election and repro- 
bation, the restriction of the atonement to the elect, 
the inamissibihty of grace, and asserted universal 
redemption, free will, and other points very nearly 
as settled by the Council of Trent. In the early 
part of the present century it was found that near- 
ly all the Arminian churches and their ministers 
in New England had silently become Pelagian and 
Unitarian. They asserted human ability in relation 
to merit, and rejected both the Calvinistic and the 



UNION AND PROGRESS. 173 

Catholic doctrine of grace, denied the Atonement, the 
Incarnation, and the proper Divinity of the Word, 
and reduced Christianity very nearly to simple nat- 
ural religion or philosophy, as every consistent rea- 
soner must do, who adopts the Pelagian heresy. 
Some few among the Unitarians, as Dr. Noah Wor- 
cester and perhaps Dr. Channing, adopted Arian views, 
or at least regarded our Lord as a superangelic per- 
son ; but the majority, at least of the preachers, re- 
garded him as a man, with one simple nature, and 
that human nature, though a man extraordinarily, 
some said miraculously endowed, and divinely com- 
missioned to teach truth and righteousness, chiefly 
through the singular purity and holiness of his life. 
He taught nothing which, when once revealed, is 
above the ability of reason to comprehend, and was 
in his moral perfection in no sense above our aim or 
our reach. To be Christians in the full sense of the 
word we must be what he was, sons of God as he 
was the son of God. 

The Bible was regarded by Unitarians as contain- 
ing, upon the whole, a faithful and trustworthy record 
of the revelations of truth which God at sundry times 



174 THE CONVERT. 

and in divers places had been pleased to make to man- 
kind, but not as plenarily inspired, or as in all re- 
spects free from the errors and prejudices of the times 
in which it was written. .Holy men spake of old as 
they were moved by the Holy Ghost, that is by a pure 
and holy spirit or interior disposition, and may do so 
now. Men are as near to God to-day as they were 
two thousand years ago, and may, if they choose, have 
as intimate communion with him, and be as truly 
inspired by him. 

In regard to another life the Unitarians were not 
precisely agreed among themselves. A few held 
the orthodox view of a future judgment and the 
endless punishment of the wicked ; now and then 
one thought there would be a final judgment, and 
that the wicked, those who died wicked, would be 
condemned, and then annihilated. Some believed in 
future disciplinary punishment, the restoration of the 
wicked, and the ultimate holiness and happiness of all 
men ; others, and the majority, held that the future 
life would be simply a continuation, under other and 
perhaps more favorable conditions, of our present nat- 
ural life, in which we should take rank according to 



UNION AND PROGRESS. 175 

the progress made here, and in which we might grow 
better and happier, or worse and more miserable for- 
ever. With these last, so far as I had any fixed 
views on the subject, I agreed, 

/TDhe heaven the Unitarians promised in the world 
/ to come was in the natural order — a sort of natural be- 
^, atitude, such as some Catholics have supposed might 
\ be enjoyed by those in the least unpleasant part of hell. 
It was not to consist in the beatific vision, or seeing 
God as he is in himself by the supernatural light 
of glory, but in a reunion of friends, in the exercise of 
the social and benevolent affections, and the study of 
the natural sciences, in discovering the secrets of na- 
\ ture, and in admiring the beauty and harmony of the 
Creator's works. In its details it may differ from 
Mahomet's paradise, but hardly so in principle. In- 
deed there were those among us who openly claimed 
the Mahometans as good Unitarians and were quite 
disposed to fraternize with them. It need therefore 
surprise nobody that one of the most brilliant and gifted 
of the early Unitarian ministers of Boston actually 
did go to Turkey, turn Mahometan, and become a Mos- 
lem preacher. He published in English a volume of 



176 THE CONVERT. 

Mahometan sermons whicli I once read. I thought 
them equal to most Unitarian sermons I had seen or 
heard. Even John Wesley, the founder of Method- 
ism, thought Islamism an improvement on the 
Christianity of the Greeks of Constantinople. 
/^^ There was evidently nothing shocking to the 
Unitarian mind in my regarding myself as the Pre- 
cursor to the new Messias. Why should there not 
be new Messiases ? Indeed, was not Kossuth, vice- 
president of the American Bible Society, ex-Gover- 
nor of Hungary, when he came to this country a few 
years since, greeted, in so many words, as the " Sec- 
ond Messias,^' without a word of rebuke in pubhc 
even from the so-called orthodox Protestant press ? 
Did not Methodist schoolmasters in Cincinnati 
bring their young pupils to him that he might bless 
them ? The truth is, I was quite modest in claim- 
ing for myself only the part of the Precursor, and 
many came to ask me, if I was not myself a second 
Messias. The new moral world must have, of 
course, a great man, a representative man, to usher 
it in, to be its father, and founder. If I had re- 
garded myself as that man, and thus as superior, by 



UNION AND PROGRESS. 177 

1 all the difference between the first century and the 

I nineteenth, to the Founder of Christianity, it would 

have argued rather my low estimate of Him than 

my high estimate of myself, and in not doing go I 

\ proved myself more modest than some who have 

come after me. 

Not finding among my friends and acquaintances 
I the " representative man," and waiting till he should 
\ reveal himself, I concluded to commence a direct 
preparation for his coming. One man, and one man 
only, shared my entire confidence, and knew my 
! most secret thought. Him, from motives of delica- 
cy, I do not name ; but in the formation of my 
mind, in systematizing my ideas, and in general 
development and culture, I owe more to him than* 

I to any other man among Protestants. We have 
since taken divergent courses, but I loved him as I 
' have loved no other man, and shall so love and es- 
I teem him as long as I live. He encouraged me, and 
i through him chiefly I was enabled to remove to 
1 Boston and commence operations. Dr. Channing 
\ and several of his personal friends, without knowing 

all my purposes, also assisted me. I was invited to 
8'^ 



178 THE CONVERT. 

Boston to preacli to the laboring classes, and to do 
all I could to save them from the unbelief which 
had become quite prevalent among them. I ac- 
cepted the 'invitation, proposing to myself to make 
of it an opportunity to bring out my religious and 
socialist theories, and to call public attention to the 
necessity of a new religious organization of man- 
kind. I accordingly organized, on the first Sunday in 
July, 1836, " The Society for Christian Union 
Progress.'' 

The name I gave to the society was indicative of 
the principle of the future organization, and of the 
end I contemplated, — the union and progress of the 
race. I remained, with some interruption, the min- 
ister of this Society till the latter part of 1843, 
when I began to suspect that man is an indifferent 
church builder, and that God himself had already 
founded a church for us, some centuries ago, quite 
adequate to our wants, and adapted to our nature 
and destiny. My Society at one time was prosper- 
ous, but in general I could not pride myself on my 
success ; yet I saw clearly enough, that with more 
confidence in myself, a firmer grasp of my own con- 



UNION AND PROGRESS. 179 

victions, a stronger attachment to my own opinions 
because they were mine, and a more dogmatic tem- 
per than I possessed, I might easily succeed, not in 
founding a new Catholic Church indeed, but in 
founding a new sect, and perhaps a sect not without 
influence. But a new sect was not in my plan, and 
I took pains to prevent my movement from grow- 
ing into one. What I wanted was not sectarism, 
of which I felt we had had quite too much, but 
unity and catholicity. I wished to unite men, not 
to divide them, to put an end to divisions, not to 
multiply them. 

The truth is, I was not, except on a few points, 
settled in my own mind. I never concealed or af- 
fected to conceal that I regarded myself as still a 
learner, a seeker after truth, not as one who has 
found the truth, and has nothing to do but to preach 
it. I always told my congregation that I was look- 
ing for more light, and that I could not be sure that 
my convictions would be to-morrow what they are 
to-day. Whether I preached or wrote I aimed simply 
at exciting thought and directing it to the problems 
to be solved, not to satisfy the mind or furnish it 



180 THE CONVERT. 

with dogmatic solutions of its difl&culties. I was 
often rash in my statements^ because I regarded 
myself not as putting forth doctrines that must be 
believed, but as throwing out provocatives to thought 
and investigation. My confidence was not in the 
individual mind, whether my own or another's, but 
in humanity, in the action and decisions of the 
general mind, the universal reason. 

I was perfectly consistent in this, and my course, 
I thought then, and I think now, was the only hon- 
est course, for a man who has not an infallible au- 
thority to which he can appeal, and in the name of 
which he is commissioned to speak. If the crite- 
rion of truth is the universal reason, or the reason 
of all men, not my individual reason, and if I am 
imperfect and yet progressive, never knowing the 
whole truth, yet able to know more to-morrow than 
I know to-day, how can I, as an honest man, regard 
my private opinions as dogmas, or put forth my 
personal convictions, as so much eternal and immu- 
table truth ? What as yet the universal reason 
has not passed upon, what has not as yet received 
the seal of approbation from universal and immu- 



UNION AND PROGKESS. 181 

table human nature^ can be regarded only as private 
opinion, which I have no right to ask others to be- 
lieve, or to assert as indisputable. I was in fact 
too honest, too consistent, and too distrustful of my- 
self to succeed. 



CHAPTEE X. 



MY " NEW views/' 



I WROTE and published, immediately after organizing 
my Society, a small work entitled, New Views of 
Christianity^ Society^ and the Churchy derived in 
great part from Benjamin Constant, Victor Cousin, 
Heinrich Heine, and the publications of the Saint- 
Simonians. It was designed to set forth the reasons 
which made a new church necessary, to assert the 
principles on which it must be founded or the end 
it must be established to effect, and to call atten- 
tion to the signs of the times favorable to its 
speedy organization. The book made little sensa- 
tion, and had few readers. It met with no success 
flattering to the pride or vanity of its author, yet 
the book is remarkable for its protest against Pro- 
testantism, and its laughable blunders as to the 



183 

doctrines and tendencies of the Catholic Church, to 
which I was by no means hostile, but of which I 
was profoundly ignorant. It is no less remarkable 
for its acceptance and vindication, in principle, of 
nearly all the errors into which the human race has 
fallen. It is the last word of the non-Catholic 
world, and marks the limit beyond which it cannot 
advance without recoiling. 

In one respect, I misjudged my countrymen : 
they had less understanding of their Protestantism 
than I gave them credit for. They were unable to 
recognize their own thoughts in the general and ab- 
stract form in which I stated them. The truth, I 
suppose, is, that Protestants, with individual excep- 
tions, seldom reason on their Protestantism, or take 
the trouble to analyze it and understand what it really 
is. They do not reduce it to its ultimate principles, 
and appreciate them in their real and essential char- 
acter. Perhaps they are not capable of doing it ; 
perhaps they are too busy with the world to attempt 
it ; perhaps, also, they have a lurking suspicion, 
that should they attempt it, they would find it dis- 
appearing in the process, and themselves reduced to 



184 THE CONVERT. 

the necessity of clioosing between Catholicity and 
no-religion. There is no doubt that, if they aTe de- 
termined to be Protestants, they are wise. Few 
who have thoroughly analyzed Protestantism, thor- 
oughly mastered its distinctive principles, have been 
able to retain their respect for it. 

I found my countrymen more attached to the 
Protestant name and traditions, and more hostile to 
the Catholic Church than I had supposed them. I 
could not understand why they should cling so tena- 
ciously to a mere shadow, or pursue so unrelentingly 
the dead. For my part, I was no Catholic, should 
never be a Catholic, but I felt no hostility to Catho- 
licity. It had been respectable in its day, had done 
good service to mankind for a thousand years, and 
was now dead and buried. Why war against it ? 
Kather strew fresh flowers on its grave, and breathe 
over its mouldering ashes a requiescat in pace. For 
Protestantism, regarded as a rehgion, I had had 
since my brief trial of Presbyterianism no respect, 
no affection. All that it had of religion was bor- 
rowed from the Church, and all it had of its own was 
simple negation. Undoubtedly it had, I conceded, 



185 



been necessary in its time, when the work to be done 
was to demolish the old Church ; undoubtedly it 
had done good service as a destroying angel, in 
breaking the chains in which the Papacy held the 
world, and in obtaining for the race the freedom to 
advance ; but it had done its work, and was no 
longer justifiable or excusable. It had become mis- 
chievous, more mischievous than was Catholicity 
when Luther rose up against it. It could not com- 
mand the intellect of the age, could not meet the 
wants of the heart, could not aid or direct the pro- 
gress of the race. It was a dissolvent, but no har- 
monizer. It split by its everlasting protests, criti- 
cisms, and negations the race into divisions, but had 
no power to reunite them, and make them of one 
mind and one heart. As a religious institution it 
was a sham, and no reality. It only disgusted men 
with the very name of religion, and drove every liv- 
ing man, every man of free thought and loving heart, 
into doubt, infidelity, atheism, or chilled all his 
nobler feelings, rendered him indifferent to all ele- 
vated thought, or generous and noble deeds, and 
forced him to engross himself in the pursuit of wealth, 



186 THE CONVERT. 

or to seek dissipation in effeminating sensual plea- 
sures. 

As I recovered in some measure from my abso- 
lute unbelief, and saw and felt the necessity of reli- 
gion as the agent of progress^ I devoted myself to 
solving the problem of a religion which should be 
neither Protestantism nor Catholicity, but which 
should embody all that was true and holy in the 
latter, with the free spirit, the ideas, and sentiments 
which had been developed by the former. I had 
studied the new philosophy of Cousin, and had 
seized firm hold of its eclectic feature, the feature 
which at that time struck me with the most force. 
Other elements of M. Cousin's philosophy afterwards 
had more charm for me ; but when I first became ac- 
quainted with it in 1833, I knew little of metaphy- 
sics, and only attended to those things in the works 
I read, which I could appropriate to my purposes, 
or which I found solving or appearing to solve the 
problems, with which I was more especially occu- 
pied. 

For M. Cousin's ontology or his psychology, 
words of which I hardly understood the meaning, I 



187 

cared little. Whether the method of philosophizing 
be intuitive or demonstrative ; whether we derive 
all our ideas through the senses or have a noetic 
faculty, by which we may attain directly the non- 
sensible world, was for me a matter of comparative 
indifference. I did not and could not study philo- 
sophy for its own sake. But the eclectic character 
of the system arrested my attention, and M. Cou- 
sin's assertion that all systems are true in what they 
affirm, false only in what they deny, or only in that 
they are exclusive, set my head at work. If this is 
true in philosophy, it must be equally true in reli- 
gious systems, and I immediately concluded with 
Leibnitz, though I knew not then that Leibnitz had 
so concluded, that all sects are right in what they 
affirm, false in what they deny or exclude. Exam- 
ine all sects then, analyze them, get at the affirma- 
tive or positive principle of each, and mould, in 
the light of a higher unity, those principles into a 
uniform and harmonious whole, and you will have 
the pure truth without admixture of error. This is 
true, so far as it concerns truth of the natural order, 
or truth as a development of human nature ; but it 



188 THE CONVERT. 

will not apply to supernatural revelatiou, or even to 
the natural order, only up to the present moment, 
if we assume the progressive development of man- 
kind, and the progressive nature of truth itself. 
The former did not disturb me, for I had not yet 
attained to a belief in supernatural revelation prop- 
erly so called, and I made allowance for the latter. 

With my principle of eclecticism I proceeded to 
examine and ascertain the affirmative portion of 
Catholicity, and the affirmative portion of Protes- 
tantism. I began my book by asserting the theory 
already developed of the origin of religion in a senti- 
ment natural to man, and the progressive nature of 
the forms with which man clothes it. Then I con- 
sidered Catholicism as the first form which the reli- 
gious sentiment assumed under Christianity. This 
form embodied the noblest sentiments and the most 
advanced intelligence of the age in which it origi- 
nated, and served the race for a thousand years. 
But it was founded on an exclusive principle, and 
could not, therefore, answer for all times and all 
stages of human progress. I found, taking it as 
represented to me by Heine and the Saint-Simo- 



MY "new views/' 189 

nians, that its principle was exclusive spiritualism, 
and the neglect or depression of the material order. 
It fitted men to die, but not to live ; for heaven, but 
not for earth, — promising a heaven hereafter, but 
creating none here. Then I proceeded to Protes- 
tantism, and found it, as distinguished from Ca- 
tholicism^ based on exclusive materialism, and the 
depression or the denial of the spiritual. It takes 
care of this life, but neglects that which is to come ; 
amasses material goods, but lays up no treasures 
in heaven, rehabilitates the flesh, but depresses the 
spirit ; elevates humanity, but obscures the Divinity. 
It is in principle the revival of Greek and Roman 
heathenism, and has culminated in the worship of a 
prostitute as the goddess of Reason, and the conver- 
sion of the Church into the Pantheon as in the 
French Revolution of 1789. Each system is wrong 
in what it excludes, and each is right in what it 
afl&rms. What is wanted is the union of the two 
in all that they have that is affirmative. And this 
union of Catholicism and Protestantism, of spirit- 
ualism and materialism, or spirit and matter, was 
what I meant by union in the name of my Society, 



190 THE CONVERT. 

and I asserted union as tlie condition of progress. 
As separate systems both had exhausted their ener- 
gies, and accomplished all they could for mankind, 
and the time had come for the union of the two, 
the spiritual and the material, the heavenly and the 
earthly, the eternal and the temporal, the Divine 
and the human, realizing the idea of the God-man, 
asserted by the Christian dogma ; and their embodi- 
ment in an outward organization of mankind, which 
should secure to each full play for its activity in 
harmony with the other. Thus we should provide 
alike for soul and body at one and the same time, 
get rid of that dualism which has hitherto rent 
asunder both the individual and society, and been 
the source of life's tragedy, and restore love, har- 
mony, peace, in the bosom of each, — the realization 
of the Atonement, or the Eeconciliation. 

How this union was to be effected outwardly, or 
what would be the precise form of this new organiza- 
tion, I did not clearly perceive, or pretend to be able 
to determine. The idea must go before its embodi- 
ment. My mission was not to effect the organiza- 
tion, but to develop and set forth the idea. Once get 



MY ^^NEW views/' 191 

men fairly imbued with the idea, in love with it, con- 
vinced of its truth, and anxious for its external reali- 
zation, and the great man, who, having realized it in- 
ternally for himself, will appear to realize it exter- 
nally for the world, — a new Moses, — a new Christ. 

Wild, visionary, and absurd as all this may seem, 
it is nothing but a statement of the common belief 
of my non-Catholic countrymen. Protestantism in 
its origin pretended to be a return to the truth and 
simphcity of primitive Christianity, and a few Prot- 
estants, who are simply men of routine, may pretend 
the same even yet, but these are the old fogies of the 
Protestant world, and do not carry the age or the 
country with them. Protestantism is defended to- 
day as an advance on Catholicity in Christian truth 
and knowledge, and the Church is condemned as 
stationary, as inflexible, inexpansive, and neither ad- 
vancing herself nor permitting mankind to advance. 
She is denounced as behind the age, as not up with 
the times, and as bent on keeping men back in the 
narrow ideas, the ignorance and superstition of the 
Dark Ages. She is condemned as being hostile to 
material civilization, as neglecting the body, as de- 



192 THE CONVERT. 

manding the crucifixion of the fleshy as insisting on 
penance, mortification, and detachment from the 
world. Protestantism, on the other hand, is lauded 
as a progressive religion, a religion that allows full 
scope to human activity, that aids men forward in 
material progress, encourages industry, thrift, com- 
merce, manufactures, enterprise, — ^invents steam- 
boats, railroads, lightning telegraphs, and makes all 
nature contribute to the earthly well-being of man. 
Are we not every day reminded of the alleged ma- 
terial superiority of Protestant nations to Catholic 
nations, as a proof of the truth of Protestantism, and 
of the falsity and mischievousness of Catholicity ? 
There is no denying it. 

Again, is it not the constant effort of all Protes- 
tants, who retain a sense of religion, to unite in their 
church the human and the Divine, the earthly and 
the heavenly, the material and the spiritual^ the tem- 
poral and the eternal, — to combine their love of the 
world with the love of God, and to find out an easier 
way to get to heaven than that by penance, mortifi- 
cation, self-denial, and detachment from the world ? 



MY ^^NEW VIEWS." 193 

Everybody, up to the intelligence of the age, knows 
that it is so, and concedes it. 

With regard to the Church, the great mass of my 
non-Catholic countrymen hold that it was divine only 
in the sense that the idea around which it is formed, 
and which it seeks to embody, was divinely revealed. 
They nearly all hold with Guizot that '^ Christianity 
came into the world a naked idea,'^ a doctrine, and 
operating as such in men's minds and hearts, has led 
them to form or organize the Church. Even the mass 
of Episcopalians, approaching nearer to church views 
than any other sect at present among us, take the 
church from the doctrine, not the doctrine from the 
church. The whole tendency of the age is to regard 
religion as a development of man, of his higher na- 
ture, and the Church as the outward expression of 
the inward thought. This is the doctrine taught by 
the leading Protestant minds of France, Germany, 
Great Britain, and the United States. Even those 
who the most distinctly assert divine revelation, regard 
it as quickening thought and aiding its development, 
rather than as teaching any distinct, formal, object- 
ive doctrines. I was then really only up to the level 
9 



194 THE CONVERT. 

of Protestantism, and in principle did not differ 
essentially from my Protestant contemporaries. I 
drew, perhaps, conclusions different from theirs, or 
more likely, I drew conclusions where they drew none, 
and held themselves in suspense. 

My views were hardly new or singular, but the man- 
ner in which they were received was instructive, and 
satisfied me that my Protestant countrymen, though 
disclaiming all authority in matters of belief, and pro- 
fessing to discard all authoritative tradition, were little 
accustomed, except in worldly affairs, to free, inde- 
pendent, distinct thought. For the most part their 
behef, I found, was practically a prejudice. They had 
never thought out their doctrines, and they took them 
merely on trust, and that, too, without ever troubling 
themselves to inquire whether they accorded or not 
with what they held to be the principles of reason. 
They held aU my views, though mixed up with much 
extraneous and contradictory matter. Yet they re- 
coiled, or affected to recoil, with horror from my 
statements, and bespattered me with cant phrases 
and epithets, to which, I presume, not onQ in ten 
attached any definite meaning, and of those who did 



MY "new views." 195 

attach such meaning, not one in a hundred believed 
it, or was not prepared in the next breath to contra- 
dict it. 

. I was convinced that I had gone too fast for the 
pubhc, and that there remained a greater preliminary- 
work to be done than I had supposed. To effect 
something in regard to this preliminary work,(I es- 
tabhshed, in January 1838, a Quarterly Eeview, 
which I conducted almost single-handed for five years, \ 
and in 1840 published, " Charles Elwood, or the Infi- I 
del converted,'' a philosophico-religious work, strung ' 
together on a slight thread of fiction^ My Quarterly • 
Eeview was devoted to religion, philosophy, politics, 
and general literature. It had no creed, no distinct 
doctrines to support on any subject whatever, and 
was intended for free and independent discussion of 
all questions which I might regard as worth discuss- 
ing, not, however, with a view . of settling them, or 
putting an end to any dispute. I had purposes to 
accomphsh, but not, and I did not profess to have, a 
body of truth I wished to bring out and make pre- 
vail. My aim was not dogmatism, but inquiry, and 
my more immediate purpose was to excite thought, 



196 THE CONVERT. 

to quicken the mental activity of my countrymen, 
and force them to think freely and independently on 
the gravest and most delicate subjects. I aimed to 
startle, and made it a point to be as paradoxical and as 
extravagant as I could without doing violence to my 
own reason and conscience. Whoever reads the five 
volumes of that Keview, nearly all written by myself, 
with the view of finding clear, distinct, and consist- 
ent doctrines on any subject, with the exception of 
certain political questions, will be disappointed ; but 
whoever reads it to find provocatives to thought, 
stimulants to inquiry, and valuable hints on a great 
variety of important topics, will probably be satisfied. 
I did what I aimed to do, effected my purpose, and 
though its circulation was limited, its influence was 
such as to satisfy me. The Eeview should be judged 
by the purpose for which it was instituted, not merely 
by the speculations it contains. Many of them, no 
doubt, are crude, rash, and thrown out with a certain 
recklessness which nothing, if I had aimed to dogma- 
tize, could justify, but as designed simply to set other 
minds to thinking, may perhaps escape any great 
severity of censure. 



MY ^^NEW views/' 197 

None of my countrymen are less disposed to ac- 
cept entire the speculations, theories, and utterances 
of that Quarterly Keview, than I am, and yet I believe 
it deserves an honorable mention in the history of 
American Literature, and the opinions it enunciates 
on a great variety of topics are substantially such as 
I still hold on the same topics. On other points I 
should have been right if my facts had been true. 
It will be generally found, to speak after the man- 
ner of the logicians, that my major was sound, but 
my minor often needed to be denied, or distinguished. 
There is much in these volumes, especially the later 
ones, to indicate that my mind did not remain sta- 
tionary, that I was beginning to look in the direction 
of the CathoHc Church, and that I had, after all, less 
to change on becoming a Catholic than was commonly 
supposed at the time. The public read me more or 
less, but hardly knew what to make of me. They 
regarded me as a bold and vigorous writer, but 
as eccentric, extravagant, paradoxical, constantly 
changing, and not to be counted on, not perceiving 
that I did not wish to be counted on in their sense, 
as a leader whom they could safely follow, and who 



198 THE CONVERT. 

would save them the labor of thinking for themselves. 
My aim was to induce, to force others to think for 
themselves, not to persuade them to permit me to 
do their thinking for them. This aim was just and 
proper in one who knew he had no authority to teach. 



CHAPTEE XI. 

SAINT-SIMONISM. 

y 

If I drew my doctrine of Union in part from the 
Eclecticism of Cousin, I drew my views of the 
Churcli and of the reorganization of the race from the 
Saint- Simonians, — a philosophico-religions, or a polit- 
ico-philosophical sect that sprung up in France under 
the Kestoration, and figured largely for a year or two 
under the monarchy of July. Their founder was 
Claude Henri, Count de Saint-Simon, a descendant 
of the Due de Saint-Simon, well known as the author 
of the Memoirs. He was born in 1760, entered the 
army at the age of seventeen, and the year after 
came to this country, where he served with distinction 
in our Kevolutionary War under Bouillie. After the 
peace of 1783, he devoted two years to the study of 



200 THE CONVERT. 

our people and institutions, and tlien returned to 
France. Hardly had he returned before he found 
himself in the midst of the French Eevolution, which 
he regarded as the practical application of the prin- 
ciples or theories adopted hf the Keformers of the 
sixteenth century and popularized by the philoso- 
phers of the eighteenth. He looked upon that revo- 
lution, we are told, as having only a destructive mis- 
sion, necessary, important, but inadequate to the 
wants of humanity, and instead of being carried 
away by it, as were most of the young men of his age 
and his principles, he set himself at work to amass 
materials for the erection of a new social edifice on 
the ruins of the old, which should stand and improve 
in solidity, strength, grandeur, and beauty forever. 
\; The way he seems to have taken to amass these 
materials was to engage with a partner in some grand 
speculations for the accumulation of wealth, and specu- 
lations too, it is said, not of the most honorable or even 
the most honest character. His plans succeeded for 
a time, and he became very rich, as did many others 
in those troublous times ; but he finally met with re- 
verses, and lost all but the wrecks of his fortune. He 



SAINT-SIMONISM. 201 

then for a number of years plunged into all manner 
of vice, and indulged to excess in every species of 
dissipation, not, we are told, from love of vice, any in- 
ordinate desire, or any impure affection ; but for the 
holy purpose of preparing himself by his experience 
for the great work of redeeming man, and securing 
for him a paradise on earth. Having gained all that 
experience could give him in the department of vice, 
he then proceeded to consult the learned professors 
of rficole Polytechnique for seven or ten years to make 
himself master of science, literature, and the fine arts 
in all their departments, and to place himself at the 
level of the last attainments of the race. Thus qual- 
ified to be the founder of a new social organization, he 
wrote several books, in which he deposited the germs 
of his ideas, or rather the germs of the future, and 
most of which have hitherto remained unpublished. 

But now that he was so well qualified for his 
work, he found himself a beggar, and had as yet 
made only a single disciple. He was reduced to 
despair, and attempted to take his own life ; but 
failed, the ball only grazing his sacred forehead. His 
faithful disciple was near him, saved him, and aroused 



202 THE CONVERT. 

him into life and hope. When he recovered he found 
that he had fallen into a gross error. He had been a 
materialist, an atheist, and had discarded all religious 
ideas as long since outgrown by the human race. He 
had proposed to organize the human race with ma- 
terials furnished by the senses alone, and by the aid 
of positive science. He owns his fault, and conceives 
and brings forth a new Christianity, consigned to a 
small pamphlet entitled Nouveau Ohristianisme^ 
which was immediately published. This done, his 
mission was ended, and he died May 19, 1825, and I 
suppose was buried. 

Saint-Simon, the preacher of a new Christianity, 
very soon attracted disciples, chiefly from the pupils 
of the Polytechnic School, ardent and lively young 
men, full of enthusiasm, brought up without faith 
in the Gospel, and yet unable to live without religion 
of some sort. Among the active members of the 
sect were at one time Pierre Leroux, Jules and 
Michel Chevalier, Lerminier, my personal friend, 
Dr. Poyen, who initiated me and so many others in 
New England into the mysteries of Animal Magnet- 
ism. Dr. Poyen was, I believe, a native of the isl- 



SAINT-SIMONISM. 203 

and of Guadaloupe, a man of more ability than he 
usually had credit for, of solid learning, genuine 
science, and honest intentions. I knew him well, 
and esteemed him highly. When I knew him his 
attachment to the new religion was much weakened, 
and he often talked to me of the old Church, and as- 
sured me that he felt at times that he must return 
to her bosom. I owe him many hints which turned 
my thoughts towards Catholic principles, and which, 
with God's grace, were of much service to me. 
These and many others were in the sect, whose 
chiefs, after the death of its founder, were Bazard, a 
Liberal, and a practical man, who killed himself, and 
Enfantin, who, after the dissolution of the sect, 
sought employment in the service of the Viceroy of 
Egypt, and occupies now some important post in 
connection with the French railways. 
\/ The sect began in 1826, by addressing the work- 
ing classes, but their success was small. In 1829 
they came out of their narrow circle, assumed a bolder 
tone, addressed themselves to the general pubUc, 
and became in less than eighteen months a Parisian 
mode. In 1831 they purchased the Globe newspa- 



204 THE CONVERT. 

per, made it their organ, and distributed gratuitously 
five thousand copies daily. In 1832 they had estab- 
lished a central propagandism in Paris, and had their 
missionaries in most of the departments of France. 
They attacked the hereditary peerage, and it fell; they 
seemed to be numerous and strong, and I believed for 
a moment in their complete success. They called 
their doctrine a religion, their ministers priests, and 
their organization a church, and as such they claimed 
to be recognized by the State, and to receive from 
it a subvention as other religious denominations. 
But the courts decided that Saint- Simonism was 
not a religion, and its ministers were not religious 
teachers. This decision struck them with death. 
Their prestige vanished. They scattered, dissolved 
in thin air, and went off, as Carlyle would say, into 
endless vacuity, as do sooner or later all shams and 
unrealities. 

SaintrSimoii himself, who, as presented to us by 
his disciples, is a half mythic personage, seems, so 
far as I can judge by those of his writings that I 
have seen^ to have been a man of large ability, and 
laudable intentions ; but I have not been able to find 



SAINT-SIMONISM. 205 

any new or original thoughts of which he was the in- 
disputable father. His whole system^ if system he 
had, is summed up in the two maxims ; ^^Eden is 
before us, not behind us/' or the golden age of 
the poets is in the future, not in the past, and 
" society ought to be so organized as to tend in the 
most rapid manner possible to the continuous moral^ 
intellectual, and physical ameUoration of the poorer 
and more numerous classes/' He simply adopts the 
doctrine of progress set forth with so much flash elo- 
quence by Condorcet, and the philanthropic doctrine 
with regard to the laboring classes, or the people, 
defended by Barbeuf, and a large section of the 
French Eevolutionists. His religion was not so 
much as the Theophilanthropy attempted to be in- 
troduced by some members of the French Directory. 
It admitted God in name, and in name did not 
deny Jesus Christ, but it rejected all mysteries, and 
reduced religion to mere socialism. It conceded 
that Catholicity had been the true Church down to 
the Pontificate of Leo X., because down to that 
time its ministers had taken the lead in directing 
the intelligence and labors of mankind, had aided 



206 THE CONVERT. 

the progress of civilization^ and promoted the well- 
being of the poorer and more numerous classes. 
But since Leo X., who made of the Papacy a secu- 
lar principality, it had neglected its mission, had 
ceased to labor for the poorer and more numerous 
classes, had leagued itself with the ruling orders, 
and lent all its influence to uphold tyrants and ty- 
ranny. A new church was needed — a church which 
should realize the ideal of Jesus Christ, and tend 
directly and constantly to the moral, physical, and 
social amelioration of the poorer and more numerous 
classes — ^in other words, the greatest happiness in 
this life of the greatest number, the principle of 
Jeremy Bentham and his Utilitarian school. 

His disciples enlarged upon the hints of the 
master, and attributed to him ideas which he never 
entertained. They endeavored to reduce his hints 
to a complete system of religion, philosophy, and 
social [organization. Their chiefs I have said were 
Bazard and Enfantin. Amand Bazard was born in 
Paris in 1791, and at the age of twenty-two married 
the daughter of Joubert the Conventionalist. He 
was a rigid republican, and the principal founder 



SAINT-SIMONISM. 207 

of the French Carbonari. He held an eminent rank 
in the French secret societies, was Venerable of the 
Lodge of the Amis de la Verite, and after the foun- 
dation of the Carbonari was President of the Haute 
Veute, and of the Veute Supreme, and most of the 
orders circulated in the association were from him. 
He was the life and soul of nearly all the move- 
ments, plots, and conspiracies in behalf of republi- 
canism under the Kestoration. He was in those 
times, though less before the public, very much what 
Mazzini is in ours. In October, 1825, he became 
acquainted with the little band of disciples left by 
Saint-Simon, and joined himself to them, and was 
the ablest and most competent man, so far as it 
' regards external organization and direction, the sect 
ever had. He was a politician, a revolutionist, and 
stamped his own character on the school. 

Barthelemy Prosper Enfantin, the son of a banker, 
born at Paris 1796, was a man of a different stamp, 
better fitted for thinking, or rather dreaming, than 
acting. Bazard evidently adopted Saint-Simonism 
as an instrument to be used, or as an engine which 
he hoped to use in accomplishing his own political 



208 THE CONVERT. 

and social purposes ; Enfantin appears to have 
really believed in the mission of his master, and to 
have entered sincerely, with all his soul, into his 
new religion. He was endowed with rare philoso- 
phical genius, was of a contemplative turn of mind, 
and of great natural religious fervor. He was firm, 
conscientious, and would for no prospect of gain, 
or the success of his sect, make the slightest com- 
promise of principle, or sacrifice a single iota of what 
he held to be right. Had he been a CathoUc he 
would have suft'ered martyrdom, or been a saint 
whom the faithful would have dehghted to hold 
in honor through all ages. As it was, he was 
too scrupulous to make the compromises necessary 
for success in a scheme that could not afford to be 
honest, and the larger portion of his associates re- 
garded him as a bigot, a fanatic, and laid the blame 
of their divisions and failures to his obstinacy, — 
to what I should call his sincerity, firmness, and 
consistency. 

These two men elaborated the Saint-Simonian 
doctrine and the Saint-Simonian reUgion. Bazard 
took the lead in what related to the external, politi- 



SAINT-SIMONISM. 209 

cal^ and economical organization, and Enfantin in 
what regarded doctrine and worship. The philoso- 
phy or theology of the sect or school was derived 
principally from Hegel, and was a refined Pantheism. 
Its Christology was the unity, not union, of the Di- 
vine and human, and the Incarnation symbolized the 
unity of God and man, or the Divinity manifesting 
himself in humanity, and making humanity substan- 
tially divine, — the very doctrine, in reality, which 1 
myself had embraced, even before I had heard of the 
Saint- Simonians, if not before they had published it. 
The religious organization was founded on the doc- 
trine of the progressive nature of Man, and the maxim 
that all institutions should tend in the most speedy 
and direct manner possible to the constant ameliora- 
tion of the moral, intellectual, and physical condition 
of the poorer and more numerous classes. Socially 
men were to be divided into three classes, artists, sa- 
vans, and industrials, or working men, corresponding 
to the psychological division of the human faculties. 
The soul has three powers or faculties, — to love, to 
know, and to act. Those in whom the love-faculty is 
predominant belong to the class of artists, those in 



210 THE CONVERT. 

whom the knowledge-faculty is predominant belong 
to the class of savans, the scientific and the learned, 
and in fine, those in whom the act-faculty predom- 
inates belong to the industrial class. This classifica- 
tion places every man in the social category for which 
he is fitted, and to which he is attracted by his na- 
ture. These several classes are to be hierarchically 
organized, under chiefs or priests, who are respectively 
priests of the artists, of the scientific, and of the in- 
dustrials, and are, priests and all, to be subjected to 
a supreme Father, Pere Supreme^ and a Supreme 
Mother, Mire Supreme. 

The economical organization is to be based on 
the maxims, '^ To each one according to his capacity,^^ 
and " To each capacity according to its work." Pri- 
vate property is to be retained, but its transmission 
by inheritance or testamentary disposition must be 
abolished. The property is to be held by a tenure re- 
sembling that of gavel-kind. It belongs to the commu- 
nity, and the priests, chiefs, or brehons, as the Celtic 
tribes call them, to. distribute it for life to individ- 
uals, and to each individual according to his capacity." 
It was supposed that in this way the advantages of 



SAINT-SIMONISM. 211 

both common and individual property might be se- 
cured. Something of this prevailed originally in 
most nations, and a reminiscence of it still exists in 
the village system among the Sklavonic tribes of 
Eussia and Poland, and nearly all jurists niaintain 
that the testamentary right, by which a man disposes 
of his goods after his natural death, as well as that 
by which a child inherits from the parent, is a mu- 
nicipal, not a natural right. 
I y The most striking feature in the Saint-Simonian 
scheme was the rank and position it assigned to 
woman. It asserted the absolute equality of the 
sexes, and maintained that either sex is incomplete 
without the other. Man is an incomplete individual 
without woman. Hence a religion, a doctrine, a 
social institution founded by one sex alone is incom- 
plete, and can never be adequate to the wants of the 
race or a definitive order. This idea was also enter- 
tained by Frances Wright, and appears to be enter- 
tained by all our Women's Eights folk of either sex. 
The old civilization was masculine, not male and 
female as God made man. Hence its condemnation. 
The Saint- Simonians, therefore, proposed to place by 



212 THE CONVERT. 

the side of their sovereign Father at the summit of 
their hierarchy, a sovereign Mother. The man to be 
sovereign Father they found, but a woman to be sov- 
ereign Mother, Mere Supreme^ they found not. 
This caused great embarrassment, and a split between 
Bazard and Enfantin. Bazard was about marrying 
his daughter, and he proposed to place her marriage 
under the protection of the existing French laws. 
Enfantin opposed his doing so, and called it a sinful 
compliance with the prejudices of the world. The 
Saint- Simonian society, he maintained, was a state, 
a kingdom within itself, and should be governed by 
its own laws and its own chiefs without any recog- 
nition of those without. Bazard persisted, and had 
the marriage of his daughter solemnized in a legal 
manner, and for aught I know, according to the 
rites of the Church. A great scandal followed. 
Bazard charged Enfantin with denying Christian 
marriage, and with holding loose notions on the subject. 
Enfantin replied that he neither denied nor affirmed 
Christian marriage, that in enacting the existing law 
on the subject man alone had been consulted, and he 
could not recognize it as law till woman had given her 



SAINT-SIMONISM. 213 

consent to it. As yet the society was only provision- 
ally organized, inasmuch as they had not yet found 
the Mere Supreme. The law on marriage must ema- 
nate conjointly from the Supreme Father and the Su- 
preme Mother, and it would be irregular and a. usurpa- 
tion for the Supreme Father to undertake alone to 
legislate on the subject. Bazard would not submit, 
and went out and shot himself. Most of the politi- 
cians abandoned the association, and Pere Enfantin, 
almost in despair, despatched twelve apostles to 
Constantinople to find in the Turkish harems the 
Supreme Mother. After a year they returned and 
reported that they were unable to find her, and the 
society, condemned by the French courts as immoral, 
broke up, and broke up because no woman could be 
found to be its mother, and so they ended, having 
risen, flourished, and decayed in less than a single 
decade. 

The points in the Saint- Simonian movement that 
arrested my attention, and commanded my belief, 
were what it will seem strange to my readers could 
ever have been doubted, its assertion of a religious 
future for the human race, and that religion, in the 



214 THE CONVERT. 

future as well as in tlie past^ must have an organiza- 
tion, and a liierarcliical organization. Its classification 
of men according to the predominant psychological 
faculty in each, into artists, savans, and industrials, 
struck me as very well, and the maxims, " To each 
according to his capacity,^' and " To each capacity ac- 
cording to its works/' as evidently just, and desirable, 
if practicable. The doctrine of the Divinity in 
Humanity, of progress, of no essential antagonism 
between the spiritual and the material, and of the 
duty of shaping all institutions for the speediest and 
continuous moral, intellectual, and physical ameliora- 
tion of the poorer and more numerous classes, I 
already held. I was rather pleased than otherwise 
with the doctrine with regard to property, and thought 
it a decided improvement on that of a community of 
goods. The doctrine with regard to the relation of 
the sexes I rather acquiesced in than approved. I 
was disposed to maintain, as the Indian said, that 
" woman is the weaker canoe/' and to assert my mar- 
ital prerogatives ; but the equality of the sexes 
was asserted by nearly all my friends, and I remained 
generally silent on the subject, till some of the ad- 



SAINT-SIMONISM. 215 

mirers of Harriet Martineau and of Margaret Fuller 
began to scorn equality and to claim for woman su- 
periority. Then I became roused, and ventured to 
assert my masculine dignity. 

It is remarkable that most reformers find fault 
with the Christian law of marriage^ and propose to 
alter the relations which God has estabhshed both in 
nature and the Gospel between the sexes, and this is 
generally the rock on which they split. Women do 
not usually admire men who cast off their manhood, 
or are unconscious of the rights and prerogatives of 
the stronger sex, and they admire just as little those 
" strong-minded women,^' who strive to excel only in 
the masculine virtues. I have never been persuaded 
that it argues well for a people when its women are 
men, and its men women. Yet I trust I have always 
honored and always shall honor woman. I raise no 
question as to woman's equality or inequality with 
man, for comparisons cannot be made between things 
not of the same kind. Woman's sphere and office in 
life are as high, as holy, as important as man's, but 
different, and the glory of both man and woman is 



216 THE CONVERT. 

for each to act well the part assigned to each by 
Almighty God. 

The Saint-Simonian writings made me familiar 
with the idea of a hierarchy, and removed from my 
mind the prejudices against the Papacy generally en- 
tertained by my countrjrmen. Their proposed organ- 
ization, I saw might be good and desirable, if their 
priests, their Supreme Father and Mother, could 
really be the wisest, the best, — ^not merely the nom- 
inal, but the real chiefs of society. Yet what security 
have I that they will be ? Their power was to have 
no limit save their own wisdom and love, but who 
would answer for it that these would always be an 
effectual limit ? How were these priests or chiefs to 
be designated and installed in their office ? By pop- 
ular election ? But popular election often passes 
over the proper man, and takes the improper. Then 
as to the assignment to each man of a capital propor- 
tioned to his capacity to begin life with, what certainty 
is there that the rules of strict right will be followed ? 
that wrong will not often be done both voluntarily 
and involuntarily ? Are your chiefs to be infallible 
and impeccable ? StUl the movement interested 



SAINT-SIMONISM. 217 

me, and many of its principles took firm hold of me, 
and held me for years in a species of mental thral- 
dom, inasmuch as I found it difficult, if not impos- 
sible, either to refute them or to harmonize them with 
other principles which I also held, or rather, which 
held me, and in which I detected no unsoundness. 
Yet I imbibed no errors from the Saint-Simonians, 
and I can say of them as of the Unitarians, they did 
me no harm, but were, in my fallen state, the occa- 
sion of much good to me. 



10 



CHAPTER XII. 

HORRIBLE DOCTRINES. 

The Saint- Simoniaiis asserted a new Christianity. I 
held that their new Christianity was not new, and 
that it was only a just interpretation of the old 
Christianity as it lay in the mind of its Author. 
This was my chief point of difference with them. 
They asserted a religious future for mankind, and so 
did I. They asserted the necessity of a new religious 
institution or organization of society, and so did I. 
They maintained that the object or end of this new 
institution should be the amelioration, moral, in- 
tellectual, and physical, of the poorer and more nu- 
merous classes, or the creation of a heaven upon earth 
for all men, and so did I. But as to the practical 
means of reahzing this end, I had my doubts and 
misgivings. 



HORRIBLK DOCTRINES. 219 

I had come to the conclusion that the ameliora- 
tion of the laboring classes could not be effected by 
themselves alone, or by appealing solely to them. It 
could be effected only by the co-operation of all classes 
of society, or as I said, not without a slight touch of 
mysticism in my thought, the co-operation of the 
race. The organization of the race in a manner to 
secure this end, was what I meant by the new 
church. 

The Christian thought, as it existed in the mind 
of Jesus of Nazareth, I maintained, was coincident 
with Democracy. His kingdom was to be set up in 
tliis world ; his mission was to establish the reign of 
justice and love on the earth. He claimed to have 
come from God because his mission was to the poor 
and oppressed. " The Spirit of the Lord,"' he said, 
" is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach 
glad tidings to the poor, to heal them that are 
bruised, to bind up the broken-hearted, to set the 
captives free.'' To the disciples of John the Baptist, 
sent to ask him whether he was the Messias prom- 
ised, or whether they were to look for another, he 
said, '' Go tell your master, the poor have the Gos- 



220 THE CONVERT. 

pel preached unto them/' He declared the poor 
blessed, heirs of his kingdom, and pronounced a woe 
upon the rich, declaring it " easier for a camel to 
go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to 
enter into the kingdom of heaven/' He rebuked all 
cant, sham, or make-believe goodness, and declared 
to the Scribes and Pharisees, the saints of his day, 
that publicans and harlots would enter into the 
kingdom of heaven before them. He discarded 
all the titles and distinctions created by human 
pride and vanity, recognized no earth-born nobili- 
ties, no pomp of rank or earthly majesty, but looked 
on simple naked humanity, and accepted and honored 
man for his real or intrinsic worth. He loved man as 
man, and died for his redemption. The great law of 
his reUgion was love of man» " By this shall all men 
linow that ye are my disciples, if ye love one another.'' 
" A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love 
one another." " We know," said his beloted disci- 
ple, " that we have passed from death unto life, be- 
cause we love the brethren." Nor was this love to 
be confined to one's own family, friends, or nation. 
We were to love our enemies, and bless them that 



HORRIBLE DOCTRINES. 221 

curse us, do good to them that hate us. We must 
love our neighbor as ourselves, and count every man 
our neighbor to whom we can be of service, as was 
the Samaritan to the Jew who fell among thieves. 
Jesus proclaimed the worth of man as man, taught 
the great law of love, and proposed the universal 
brotherhood of the race,-— Liberty, Equality, Frater- 
nity, the noble device of the Democratic banner. 

Here was that Christian Democracy, as I called 
it, which constituted the substance of my preaching 
for ten or eleven years. I was not alone in this. It 
was substantially the doctrine of Dr. Channing and 
that section of the Unitarians that took him for their 
leader, and it was held more or less distinctly by the 
whole movement party of the time, in both Europe 
and America. It had a powerful champion in the 
unhappy Abb6 de Lamennais, both before and after 
his excommunication by Gregory XVI., and was 
maintained by all the leading Liberals of the Europe- 
an continent. Indeed, it had penetrated very widely 
even into the Catholic camp, and in 1848 we found 
in France even priests ready to assert the identity 
of Democracy and Christianity, and some, I believe. 



222 THE CONVERT. 

went so far as to call our blessed Lord the first Dem- 
ocrat, as in the old French Revolution individuals 
were found to call him the great Sans GuloUe^ and to 
speak of him as ^' le Citoyen Christ/' Even the pious 
and philosophical Rosmini seemed in his work on the 
Five Wounds of the Church, to look towards it, and 
many of the Italian clergy who favored the Repub- 
lican Revolution which compelled the flight of the 
Holy Father from Rome to Gaeta held it. It can be 
detected, in some of its phases, in Padre Ventura's 
famous Funeral Oration on Daniel O'Connell. It is, 
as the Cardinal Archbishop of Rheims has well re- 
marked, '' the great heresy of the nineteenth cen- 
tury.'' It is not singular, then, that I, believ- 
ing in progress, and therefore regarding the latest 
thought as the truest and best, should have 
adopted it. 

The doctrine, moreover, is not without its side of 
truth, especially as I defended it. Democracy, in the 
sense I defined and defended it, regarded the end 
for which government should be constituted and 
administered, rather than the origin and form of the 
government itself I never myself held the doctrine 



HORRIBLE DOCTRINES. 223 

of the native underived sovereignty of the people. 
When I believed in no God, I believed in no govern- 
ment ; for I could never understand why the people 
collectively should not be under law as well as the 
people distributively. I always said with St. Paul, 
Non est potestas nisi a Deo. When I renounced my 
atheism I derived all power from God, the source of 
all law and of all justice. I might, and probably 
did, even as I do now, derive it from God through 
the people, as the medial origin of government, and 
thus accept Mr. Bancroft's definition, that ^^De- 
mocracy is eternal justice ruling through the people,'' 
but the popular doctrine which puts the people in 
the place of God, and asserts not only people-king, 
but people-God, I never held, and is one of the 
few errors of my times into which I have never fallen. 
I had to combat the people too often. I had to make 
too frequent war on popular prejudice and popular 
errors, to believe that whatever is popular is true, 
rightj and just. I had found majorities too often in 
the wrong, to believe them either infallible or im- 
peccable. Did not the people, the majority condemn 
Socrates to drink hemlock ? Did not the people cry 



224 THE CONVERT. 

out against One greater than Socrates, ^^ Crucify him, 
crucify him ? '' and did not the majority actually 
crucify him between two thieves ? 

But Democracy as designating the end of govern- 
ment I did hold ; that is, I held that government 
should be constituted and administered for the com- 
mon good of the governed as men, irrespective of the 
accidents of rank, birth, position, or condition. This 
I held, and hold still. This is the simple dictate of 
reason or the law of nature, and is the common doc- 
trine of all the doctors of the Church in all ages and 
nations. All governments not constituted and ad- 
ministered for the common good of the governed, are 
illegitimate, whatever their form or historical origin, 
and are unable tobind the consciences of their subjects. 
Hence the Church has always inclined to the side of 
the poorer and more numerous classes, and has always 
treated with disfavor, and in her own sphere has never 
recognized the privileges and privileged orders intro- 
duced and sustained by the feudal system. She treats 
men as men, and admits, in her dealing with them, no 
noble or ignoble classes. She has one law of justice, 
one and the same office and discipline for the prince 



HORRIBLE DOCTRINES. 225 

and the peasant^ the noble and the plebeian, the lord 
and the vassal, the rich and the poor, the master and 
the slave. In this sense the Church, Christianity, is 
Democratic, and the law of nature, also, is Democratic, 
and it was in this sense that I defined Democracy to 
be "the supremacy of man over his accidents;" that 
is, it imposes on government the obligation to consult 
the good of man as man, irrespective of the accidents 
of birth, wealth, rank, position, or condition. 

In this sense only did I ever profess to be a 
Democrat, and in this sense I am a Democrat now, 
though I dislike the term, and disclaimed it as long 
ago as 1841. The proper term is republican^ which 
designates any government, whatever its form, that 
is constituted and administered in sole reference to 
the public good, or the good of the governed in 
distinction from the private good of the governors. 
Whether the Democratic form, such as is demanded 
by modern Liberals and Eevolutionists, be or be not 
the form best adapted to secure the public good, is an 
open question, which admits of much being said on 
both sides. Probably there are no two countries in 
Christendom so little favorable to the poorer and more 
10- 



226 THE CONVERT. 

numerous classes, or in which wealth has so much in- 
fluence, and it is so great a misfortune to be poor, 
as Great Britain and the United States. They do 
not, as the ancient heathen nations did, actually kill 
their poor or sell them into slavery, but they despise, 
abhor them, shut them up in workhouses, and treat 
them as criminals. Democratic, or democratically in- 
clined governments are for the most part cruel and 
hard-hearted. Like corporations they have no souls, 
and are incapable of tenderness. They have their 
advantages, but also their disadvantages, and prob- 
ably are less favorable to public prosperity than is 
commonly imagined. 

I found my countrymen attached to Democracy 
in the sense that the people are the original source 
of all power, sovereign, as The Democratic Review 
expressed it, " in their own native might andright."" 
In this sense Democracy has its expression in univer- 
sal suffrage and eligibility. But in this sense, I 
said, it is a bitter mockery, if the people are not prac- 
tically equal as individuals. Political equality may 
be a blessed thing, but to be real, any thing more 
than a delusion, it must rest 'for its basis on social 



HORKIBLE DOCTRINES. 227 

equality; equality in wealth, position, education, 
ability, influence. Man, against man and money, is 
not an equal match. Man ignorant, rude, unculti- 
vated, cannot enter into the political contest on equal 
terms with the educated, the cultivated man, with 
all the advantages society can give him. How pre- 
tend that you and I are equal, when you can influ- 
ence a thousand votes, while I can hardly control my 
own, unless I have the spirit of a martyr ? The im- 
mense majority of American voters vote with no real 
will or independence of their own. A few individuals 
contrive to manage the people, and some two or 
three hundred more determine even our national elec- 
tions, and the politics of the country. 

If, then, you will have Democracy, if you insist on 
the Democratic form, have the courage to go farther, 
and the good sense to adopt the measures necessary 
to prevent your universal suffrage and eligibility from 
being a mere sham. You must do more than you 
have done ; you must establish and maintain the 
substantial equality of conditions, so that not merely 
the rights^ but the mights of men shall be equal. 
With this thought, I wrote and published, in my 



228 THE CONVERT. 

Eeview for July, 1840, an Essay on the Laboring 
Classes, whicli had a louder echo than I had counted 
on. It was pubhshed during the heat of the presi- 
'dential electioneering campaign, and I was regarded 
at that time as a prominent member of the Demo- 
cratic party. The Whig, or opposing party, seized 
it, reprinted it, and circulated it by thousands, if not 
by hundreds of thousands, for the purpose of damag- 
ing the party with which I was connected. I was 
denounced in the press, from the pulpit, and the 
rostrum. My friends shook their heads, and were 
very sorry that I had been so imprudent, and not a 
voice was raised in my defence, or in mitigation of 
the censure with which I was visited. The Demo- 
cratic journals threw me overboard, and defended 
themselves as well as they could by disowning me, 
and declaring it unfair and unjust to hold the party 
responsible for my eccentricities and extravagances. 

The doctrines of my essay were received by my 
countrymen with one universal scream of horror, 
partly affected, no doubt, for party purposes, but 
partly real and sincere. There was no question that 
I had gone beyond the point the public could be in- 



HORRIBLE DOCTRINES. 229 

duced to go with me. Yet I had only drawn from 
the Democratic and Protestant principles, which I 
had never heard questioned from my youth up, their 
legitimate consequences ; I had only drawn from the 
premises supplied by the dominant public opinion, 
their strictly logical conclusions. I felt the blame, 
if blame there was in the case, was not mine. If 
my Protestant and Democratic countrymen said, 
^^two and two,'' wherefore could it be wrong for 
me to add, " make four ? '' With Protestantism I 
denied the Church, and the priesthood, and with the 
Democracy I denied the distinction of classes, of 
castes, of noble and ignoble, and asserted the politi- 
cal equahty of all men. I added only a change in 
the transmission and distribution of property to the 
new generation, necessary to render political equality 
a practical fact, a reality, not an illusion. What 
sin against either had I committed ? 

The essay was an honest, undisguised, fearless, 
and not ineloquent expression of thoughts which 
had been fermenting in my mind, and pressing for 
years for utterance. In it I poured out my soul, 
such as it was, and kept nothing back. I made 



230 THE CONVEKT. 

my confession to the world^ a clean breast of it, 
and I think my convalescence dates from that 
moment. But I can hardly read the essay over 
without being myself shocked, and wondering at my 
temerity in publishing it. Yet never did I speak 
more truly my honest thought, or more consistently 
with myself. Place me where I stood then ; place 
me outside of the CathoHc Church, and make me 
regard that Church as exclusive, as a spiritual ty- 
ranny, as all my Protestant countrymen maintain 
she is, and give me faith only in progress by the 
natural forces of man, and I would to-day repeat, 
and endorse every paragraph and every word I then 
wrote. 

'' Mankind,'^ I wrote, ^' came out of the savage 
state by means of the priests. Priests are the first 
civilizers of the race. For the wild freedom of the 
savage they substitute the iron despotism of the 
theocrat. This is the first step in civilization, in 
man's career of progress. It is not strange, then, 
that some should prefer the savage to the civilized 
state. Who would not rather roam the forest, with 
a free step and unshackled limb, though exposed 



HORRIBLE DOCTRINES. 231 

to hunger, cold^ and nakedness, than crouch an 
abject slave beneath the whip of the master ? As 
yet civilization has done little more than break and 
subdue man's natural love of freedom, — than tame 
his wild and eagle spirit. In what a world does 
man even now find himself, when he first awakes 
and feels some of the workings of his manly nature ? 
He is in a cold, damp, dark dungeon, and loaded all 
over with chains, with the iron eating into his soul. 
He cannot make one single free movement. The 
priest holds his conscience, fashion controls his 
tastes, and society with her forces invades the very 
sanctuary of his heart, and takes command of his 
love, that which is purest and best in his nature, 
which alone gives reality to his existence, and from 
which proceeds the only ray that pierces the gloom 
of his prison-house. Even that he cannot enjoy in 
peace and quietness, hardly at all. He is wounded 
on every side, in every part of his being, in every 
relation in life, in every idea of his mind, in every 
sentiment of his heart. 0, it is a sad world, a sad 
world to the young heart just awakening to its di- 
viner instincts ! A sad world to him who is not 



\ 



232 THE CONVERT. 

gifted with the only blessing which seems compati- 
ble with life as it is, — absolute insensibility. But 
no matter. A wise man never murmurs. He never 
kicks against the pricks. What is is, and there is an 
end of it ; what can be may be, and we will do what 
we can to make life what it ought to be. Though 
man^s first step in civilization is slavery, his last 
step shall be freedom. The free soul can never be 
wholly subdued ; the ethereal fire in man's nature 
may be smothered, but it cannot be extinguished. 
Down, down, deep in the centre of the heart it 
burns inextinguishable and forever, glowing intenser 
with the accumulating heat of centuries ; and one 
day the whole mass of humanity shall become ig- 
nited, be full of fire within and all over as a live 
coal ; and then — slavery, and whatever is foreign to 
the soul itself, shall be consumed. 

" But having traced the inequahty we complain 
of to its source, we ask again. What is the remedy ? 
The remedy is to be sought first in the destruction 
of the priest. We are not mere destructives. We 
delight not in pulling down ; but the bad must be 
removed before the good can be introduced. Con- 



HORRIBLE DOCTRINES. 233 

viction and repentance precede regeneration. More- 
over, we are Christians, and it is only by following 
out the Christian law and the example of the early 
Christians, that we can hope to effect any thing. 
Christianity is the sublimest protest against the 
priesthood ever uttered, and a protest uttered by both 
God and man, for he who uttered it was God-man. 
In the person of Jesus both God and man protest 
against the priesthood. What was the mission of 
Jesus but a solemn summons of every priesthood on 
earth to judgment, and of the human race to free- 
dom ? He discomfited the learned doctors, and 
with whips made of small cords drove the priests, 
degenerated into money-changers, from the temple 
of God. He instituted himself no priesthood, no 
form of religious worship. He recognized no priest 
but a holy life, and commanded the construction of 
no temple but that of the pure heart. He preached 
no formal religion, enjoined no creed, set apart no 
day for rehgious worship. He preached fraternal 
love, peace on earth, and good will to men. He 
came to the soul enslaved, " cabined, cribbed, con- 
fined,'' to the poor child of mortality, bound hand 



234 THE CONVERT. 

and foot, unable to move, and said in the tones of a 
God, '^ Be free, be enlarged, be there room for thee 
to grow, and expand, and overflow with love/' 

In the name of Jesus, we admit, there has been 
a priesthood instituted, and considering how the 
world went, a priesthood could not but be insti- 
tuted ; but the religion of Jesus repudiates it. It 
recognizes no mediator between God and man but 
him who died on the cross to redeem man ; no pro- 
pitiation for sin but a pure love which rises in a liv- 
ing flame to all that is beautiful and good, and 
spreads out in light and warmth for all the chilled 
and benighted sons of mortality. In calling every 
man to be a priest, it virtually condemns every 
possible priesthood, and in recognizing the religion 
of the New Covenant, the religion written on the 
h^art, of a law put within the soul, it abolishes all 
formal worship. 

" The priest is universally a tyrant, universally 
the enslaver of his brethren, and therefore it is that 
Christianity condemns him. It could not prevent 
the re- establishment of a hierarchy, but it prepared 
its ultimate destruction, by denying the inequality 



HORRIBLE DOCTRINES. 235 

of blood, by representing all men as equal before 
God, and by insisting on the celibacy of the clergy. 
The best feature of the Church was its denial to the 
clergy of the right to marry. By this it prevented 
the new hierarchy from becoming hereditary, as 
were the old sacerdotal corporations of India and 
Judea. 

" We object not to religious instruction. We 
object not to the gathering together of the people 
on one day in seven to sing and pray, and hsten to 
a discourse from a rehgious teacher ; but we object 
to every thing like an outward visible church, to 
every thing that in the remotest degree partakes of 
the priest. A priest is one who stands as a sort of 
mediator between God and men ; but we have one 
Mediator, Jesus Christ, who gave himself a ransom 
for all, and that is enough. It may be supposed 
that the Protestants have no priests ; but for our- 
selves we know no fundamental difference between 
a Catholic priest and a Protestant clergyman, as 
we know no difference, of any magnitude, in rela- 
tion to the principles on which they are b.ised, be- 
tween a Protestant church and the Catholic Church. 



236 THE CONVERT. 

Both are based on the principle of authority, both 
deny in fact, however it may be in name, the 
authority of reason, and war against freedom of 
mind ; both substitute dead works for true right- 
eousness, a vain show for the reality of piety, and 
are sustained as the means of reconciling us to God, 
without our being required to be godlike. Both 
therefore ought to go by the board.'' 

I spoke here of Protestantism as I knew it, but 
of Catholicity as it was represented to me by Prot- 
estants. The Catholic Church had been misrepre- 
sented to me, and when I came to examine her, I 
found that she did require us to be godlike, as the 
condition of our actual reconciliation with God, that 
she did require of us true righteousness, intrinsic 
justice, and sanctity, — and that this was precisely 
the most formidable objection which the Keformers 
urged against her. My statement as against Pro- 
testantism was true and just, in so far as Protestant- 
ism pretends to be a church ; but as against the 
Catholic Church was, of course, untrue. 

The first step was to demolish the outward visi- 
ble Church, and make away with the Priesthood, — 



HOREIBLE DOCTRINES. 237 

annihilate tKe Priest. The next step was '' to re- 
suscitate the Christianity of Christ. The Chris- 
tianity of the Church has done its work. We have 
had enough of that Christianity. It is powerless for 
good^ but by no means powerless for evil. It now 
unmans us and hinders the growth of God's king- 
dom. The moral energy which is awakened it mis- 
directs, and makes its deluded disciples believe that 
they have done their duty to God when they have 
joined the Church, offered a prayer, sung a psalm, 
and contributed of their means to send out a mis- 
sionary to preach unintelligible dogmas to the poor 
heathen, who, God knows, have unintelligible dogmas 
enough already, and more than enough. AU this 
must be abandoned, and Christianity as it came 
from Christ be taken up, and preached, and preached 
in simplicity and power. 

"' According to the Christianity of Christ no 
man can enter the kingdom of God, who does not 
labor with all zeal and diligence to establish the 
kingdom of God on earth ; who does not labor to 
bring down the high, and bring up the low ; to 
break the fetters of the bound, and to set the cap- 



238 THE CONVERT. 

tive free ; to destroy all oppression and to establish 
the reign of justice, which is the reign of equality, 
between man and man ; to introduce new heavens 
and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness, 
wherein all shall be as brothers, loving one another, 
and no one possessing what another lacketh. No 
man can be a Christian who does not labor to reform 
society, to mould it according to the will of God 
and the nature of man ; so that free scope shall be 
given to every man to unfold himself in all beauty 
and power, and to grow up into the stature of a per- 
fect man in Christ Jesus. Ko man can be a Chris- 
tian who does not refrain from all practices by which 
the rich grow richer, and the poor grow poorer, and 
who does not do all in his power to elevate the labor- 
ing classes, so that one man shall not be doomed to 
toil while another enjoys the fruits ; so that every 
man shall be free and independent, sitting under 
his own vine and fig tree, with none to molest or to 
make afraid. We grant the power of Christianity 
in working out the reform we demand ; we grant 
that one of the most effectual means of elevating 
the working men is to Christianize the community. 



HORRIBLE DOCTRINES. 239 

But you must Christianize it. It is the Gospel of 
Jesus that you must preach, not the Gospel of the 
Priests.'' 

After this the resort must be to the government 
as the agent of society, or the instrument of carry- 
ing out its ideas. Through the government we 
must break up the banks, and great business corpo- 
rations, destroy the modern credit system, and in- 
troduce those changes in regard to the descent and 
distribution of property proposed by the Saint- 
Simonians. These were the principal offensive 
points in my essay, though some attacks in it 
on the factory system, and on the middling classes 
of society, represented as far more hostile to the 
working men than the aristocracy, were not very ac- 
ceptable. I am not surprised that my doctrines 
were denounced as horrible, but I am surprised to 
find such men as Theodore Parker, Wendel Phillips, 
and Henry Ward Beecher, continuing to preach the 
most horrible of them, and almost with public ap- 
probation. 



CHAPTEK XIII. 

GETTING BETTER. 

It required no great effort to defend these doctrines 
on Protestant and Democratic principles. No one 
but a Catholic can consistently assert the Church 
in the sense in which I opposed it^ and the de- 
nial of the Priesthood is an essential element of 
Protestantism. It is only figuratively that Protes- 
tantism has an altar or a sacrifice, and without both 
there is no priest. Protestants have ministers and 
preachers, but no priests, and they seldom or never 
caU their preachers or pastors by that name. 

But this abolition of the Church and the Priest- 
hood was necessary to my view of the new religious 
organization of mankind. The error of the past 
had been in the double organization of society, the 
one temporal, the other spiritual. ^' The mission of 



GETTING BETTER. 241 

Jesus/' I wrote in explanation and defence of my 
Essay, "was twofold. One purpose of liis mission 
was to make an atonement for sin, and prepare tlie 
soul for heaven in the world to come. The other 
purpose was to found a holy kingdom on the earth, 
under the dominion of which all men should finally 
be brought. This holy kingdom, which Christ came 
to found on the earth, has been mistaken for the 
outward visible Church ; and the Church has there- 
fore been held to be a spiritual body, a body corpo- 
rate, independent in itself, , and distinct from the 
body politic, or civil society. This has given rise to 
a double organization of mankind ; one for material 
interests, called the State, and under the control of 
the civil government proper ; the other for spiritual 
purposes, called the Church, and governed by laws 
and officers of its own, distinct from those of the 
State. 

"Now to this we strenuously object. We 
would establish the kingdom of God on the earth, 
but we would not have a double organization of 
mankind. We would have but a single organiza- 
tion ; and this we would call not the church, but 
11 



242 THE CONVERT. 

the state. This organization should be based on 
the principles of the Gospel^ and realize them as 
perfectly as finite men can realize them. The 
kingdom of God is an inward^ spiritual kingdom. 
In plain language, it is the dominion of truth, jus- 
tice, and love. Now we would build up this king- 
dom not by founding an outward visible church, but 
by cultivating the principles of truth, justice, and 
love in the soul, and by bringing society and all its 
acts into harmony with them. Our views, if carried 
out, would realize not the imion, but the iinity of 
Church and State. They would indeed destroy the 
Church as a separate body, as a distinct organiza- 
tion ; but they would do it by transferring to the 
State the moral ideas on which the Church was pro- 
fessedly founded, and which it has failed to realize. 
They would realize that idea of a ^ Christian Com- 
monwealth,' after which our Puritan fathers so 
earnestly and so perseveringly struggled.'' 

The new church or religious institution I had 
asserted in my New Views to be necessary, it will 
be recollected, was to be based on the union or 
rather unity of the spiritual and the material ; and 



GETTING BETTER. 243 

therefore^ to be consistent, I must reject the double 
organization which had obtained under Catholicity, 
and was attempted to be continued under Protes- 
tantism. The error of the old Church was, that it 
was organized in the interest of the spiritual to the 
exclusion of the material ; the error of the State 
had hitherto been that it was organized in the in- 
terests of the material to the exclusion of the 
spiritual. The new order must unite the two, the 
spiritual and the material, in a single organization, 
as the soul and body are united and form one living 
man. 

In 1836 I was disposed to call the new organi- 
zation the Church instead of the State ; in 1840, I 
was disposed to call it the State rather than the 
Church ; but my principles, doctrines, and opinions 
were the same at both epochs. It made no differ- 
ence as to the character of the organization itself, 
by whichever name it was called ; it remained pre- 
cisely the same ; but by calling it State instead of 
Church, I could obtain for it more support. Many 
would labor to organize the State on what I re- 
garded as Christian principles, and to realize in its 



244 THE CONVEKT. 

constitution and administration the purposes of tlie 
Gospel as I understood it^lhat would have stood 
aloof or even opposed me, if I had called upon them 
to aid me in founding a new church. Moreover, I 
saw or thought I saw in the American political con- 
stitution the germ of the very organization I was in 
pursuit of This was the view taken by my most 
distinguished and influential friends. It was thought 
that by uniting with the Democratic party, at once 
the conservative and the movement party of th^ 
country, and indoctrinating it with our philosophi- 
cal, theological, and humanitarian views, we could 
make it the instrument of realizing our ideas of 
men and society. I adopted this the more readily, 
because my philosophical studies, which I had begun 
to prosecute in earnest, had led me to the rather 
important conclusion that man cannot found institu- 
tions absolutely new, that he can develop, but not 
create, and therefore the new must have its root in 
the old. The future can be only the development 
and perfection of the past. I must then either 
begin with the old Church and develop and modify 
that to the new wants, or I must do the same with 



GETTING BETTER. 245 

the State. The former is impracticable, because 
the old Church is founded on the ideas of immobility 
and unchangeableness, and therefore excludes the 
idea of its own development or progressiveness. 
This was not the case with the State, especially in 
this country. The American State contemplates 
progress, and provides for its own amendment. 
What we had then to do, was to imbue the Demo- 
cratic party with our ideas of Christian Democracy, 
in order to wield the whole political power of the 
Union in favor of the end contemplated, and to 
make the State a truly Christian State, or to de- 
velop it into that organization of mankind which 
was to rule the future. It was with this view that 
my Quarterly Keview, after the publication of its 
first number, in January, 1838, supported the Dem- 
ocratic party, and labored to imbue it with the doc- 
trines of what was then called the Boston School. 

This doctrine of the single organization of man- 
kind, or the unity of Church and State^ had many 
friends among the profoundest thinkers and most 
approved writers of the country, and is more or less 
distinctly held by our Abolitionists, and Philanthro- 



246 THE CONVERT. 

pists, who seek to make the State the agent for realiz- 
ing their spiritual ideas and moral doctrines. It was 
implied in the Keformation itself, and attempted to 
be realized by Calvin in Geneva, and by the Puritan 
Colonists of New England. It had been defended 
by Mr. Alexander H. Everett in The North Ameri- 
can Review^ and by an able writer in The Christian 
Examiner J the organ of the Unitarians, long before 
I broached it. It was embraced by the Saint-Si- 
monians, and held by all the Socialists, who did not 
reject the State for Phalansteries or Communities. 
Indeed, it is reasonable and just, if you recognize 
only the natural order. At the time I held it, 
though I accepted all the Christian mysteries in 
a sense of my own, I had no conception of the su- 
pernatural order. God and nature, or God in na- 
ture, embraced all the being or existence I admitted. 
The supernatural was either God as transcending 
creation, of which no revelation had been made, or it 
was the metaphysical, the supersensible, as Coleridge 
seemed to maintain. I had not the least conception 
of a created order of existence, or life above the 
natural, and with only a single order of life, the 



GETTING BETTER. 247 

double organization of mankind could not and can- 
not be defended. That is defensible only on tbe con- 
dition that there are two orders^ the one natural and 
the other supernatural^ and that man lives or may 
live in this world both a natural and a supernatural 
life. The Catholic Church is the supernatural or- 
ganization of the supernatural order, an order that 
cannot be represented by the State, which is and 
can be only the natural organization of the natural. 
From my stand-point at the time, I was perfectly 
right in rejecting the Church as an organization dis- 
tinct from the State. 

My doctrines touching the Church and the Priest- 
hood were not those by which I gave the most of- 
fence. The really horrible doctrines in the eyes of 
the public were my supposed doctrine on marriage, 
my condemnation of the system of wages, and my 
proposition to change the laws which govern the 
descent and redistribution of property. I have 
cited the passage relating to marriage. What was 
running in my head when I wrote it, I no longer 
remember. I did not at that time deny the indis- 
solubility of the marriage contract. My language was 



248 THE CONVEKT. 

construed to mean a denial of marriage, and the as- 
sertion of wliat is called the ^^Free Love "' system ; 
but I certainly held no such system, if I ever had 
done so, after my connection with the Fanny Wright 
school had ceased. In defending myself at the time, 
I took the Catholic ground, without much consisten- 
cy, that marriage is a sacrament and indissoluble, and 
alleged that what I complained of was the viciously 
organized state of society, which makes marriages 
mercenary, and renders it to a great extent impossi- 
ble for them to be founded on love or mutual affec- 
tion. I suspect that there was a slight touch of 
sentimentalism, and no very clear or definite mean- 
ing in what I wrote. There might have been some 
nonsense, but there was no looseness. 

The proposition with regard to property was 
thrown out avowedly, not for adoption, but for dis- 
cussion. It was simply the doctrine of the Saint- 
Simonian school, which I have already stated. It 
did not interfere with private property, or dispossess 
a single proprietor during his hfetime, or interfere 
with his free use of his property as long as he lived. 
It proceeded on the assumption that a man's right 



GETTING BETTER. 249 

of property ceases with his natural life, and therefore 
that he has no natural right to dispose of his prop- 
erty by will or testament, to take effect after his 
death, and that the right of inheritance in the child 
to the property of the parent is a municipal, not a 
natural right, or right founded in the law of nature. 
These assumptions are generally conceded or main- 
tained by jurists, and thus far I proposed nothing 
new. It was then perfectly competent for the state 
to abolish the present legislation on the subject, and 
to enact a new law of descent, and a new Statute of 
Distribution. The only question that could arise 
between me and my opponents was a question not 
of right, but of expediency. Is the proposed change 
expedient ? I contended that it was, if we meant 
to maintain political equahty really as well as nom- 
inally, and I think even now that, on this hypothesis, 
I was right. My error was in taking that equality 
seriously, and in supposing that it would be possible 
to induce my countrymen to adopt the measures ne- 
cessary to make it a reality. The objection to my 
proposition was not that it was wrong in principle, 

or would be hurtful in practice, but that it was sim- 
11* 



250 THE CONVERT. 

ply impracticable. Equality is a fine thing to pro- 
fess, to declaim about, but it is tbe last thing men 
will consent to adopt, except in name. It is not dis- 
pleasing when applied to those above us, but is very 
disgusting, unreasonable, unnatural, when applied to 
those below us. I am as good as you, does very well ; 
but, you are as good as I, is quite another afiair, and 
few will accept it, who have not the supernatural 
virtue of Christian charity. 

The gravamen of my offence was my condemna- 
tion of the modern industrial system, especially the 
system of labor at wages, which I held to be worse, 
^except in regard to the feelings, than the slave sys- 
tem at the South. In this I adopted the views of 
the socialists of France and other countries. The 
revolution we wanted now was not a revolution 
against the king or the crown, but against the Bour- 
geoisie or middling class. They who in the European 
revolutions of 1848 clamored for la Republique 
democratique et sociale, held only the views I had 
advocated in my essay on the laboring classes, and 
they were the only consistent party that I was able 
to detect in those revolutions. A Democratic govern- 



GETTING BETTER. 251 

ment that leaves untouched all the social inequalities, 
or inequalities of condition, which obtain in all coun- 
tries, always struck me as an absurdity, and I have seen 
no reason to change my opinions on that point. The 
political history of my own country tends to confirm 
them. In 1840 I had not wholly ceased to believe it 
possible to introduce such changes into our social and 
economical arrangements as would give to the political 
equality asserted by American Democracy a practical 
significance. I have got bravely over that since. 

I took in regard to society, even as late as 1840, 
the Democratic premises as true and unquestionable 
They were given me by the public sentiment of my 
country. I had taken them in with my mother's 
milk, and had never thought of inquiring whether 
they were tenable or not. I took them as my polit- 
ical and social starting-point or principium^ and 
sought simply to harmonize government and society 
with them. If I erred, it was in common with my 
Democratic countrymen, and I differed from them 
only in seeking what they did not seek, to be con- 
sistent in error. Democratic government was de- 
fended on the groimd that it recognized and main- 



252 ' THE CONVERT. 

tained the equality of all men, and was opposed to 
the system of privilege, class, or castes. It asserted 
equality as a natural right, and assumed that the 
introduction and maintenance of equality between 
man and man is desirable, and essential to the moral, 
intellectual, and physical well-being of mankind on 
earth. Taking this, without examination, to be true, 
I concluded very reasonably that we ought to conform 
society to it, and that whatever in society is repug- 
nant to it, and tends to prevent its practical realiza- 
tion, is wrong, and should be warred against. My 
countrymen did not understand me, because they 
were not in the habit of generalizing their own views, 
and testing them by the light of first principles. 
They could reason well enough on particulars, or in 
particular instances, but not as to the whole of their 
political and social ideas. They could accept incon- 
gruous ideas, and felt no inconvenience in supporting 
anomalies and inconsistencies. They could defend 
with equal earnestness perfect equality in theory, 
and the grossest inequality in practice, and call it 
common sense. I could not do that. Either con- 
form your practice, I said, to your theory, or your 



GETTING BETTER. 253 

theory to your practice. Be Democrats socially, or 
do not claira to be so politically. Alas ! I did not 
know then that men act from habit, prejudice, 
routine, passion, caprice, rather than from reason, 
and that of all people in the world Englishmen and 
Americans are the least disturbed by incongruities, 
inconsistencies, inconsequences, and anomalies, — al- 
though I was beginning to suspect it. 

Starting from the Democratic theory of man and 
society, I contended that the great, the mother evil 
of modern society was the separation of capital and 
labor, or the fact that one class of the community 
owns the funds, and another and a distinct class is 
compelled to perform the labor of production. The 
consequence of this system is that owners of capital 
enrich themselves at the expense of the owners of 
labor. The system of money wages, the modern sys- 
tem, is more profitable to the owners of capital than 
the slave system is to the slave masters, and hardly 
less oppressive to the laborer. The wages, as a gen- 
eral rule, are never sufficient to" enable the laborer to 
place himself on an equal footing with the capitalist. 
Capital will always command the lion's share of the 



254 THE CONVERT. 

proceeds. This is seen in the fact that while they 
who command capital grow rich, the laborer by his 
simple wages at best only obtains a bare subsistence. 
The whole class of simple laborers are poor, and in 
general unable to procure by their wages more than 
the bare necessaries of life. This is a necessary re- 
sult of the system. The capitalist employs labor 
that he may grow rich or richer ; the laborer sells 
his labor that he may not die of hunger, he, his wife, 
and little ones, and as the urgency of guarding against 
hunger is always stronger than that of growing rich 
or richer, the capitalist holds the laborer at his mer- 
cy, and has over him, whether called a slave or a 
freeman, the power of life and death. 

An examination into the actual condition of the 
laboring classes in all countries, especially in Great 
Britain and the United States, where the modern 
industrial and commercial system is carried farthest, 
proves this reasoning to be correct. Poor men may 
indeed become* rich, but not by the simple wages of 
unskilled labor. They never do become rich, except 
by availing themselves in some way of the labors of 
others. Dependent on wages alone, the laborer re- 



GETTING BETTER. 255 

mains always poor, and shut out from nearly all tlie 
advantages of society. In what are called prosj)erous 
times he may, by working early and late, and with 
all his might, retain enough of the proceeds of his 
labor to save him from actual want, but in what are 
called '^ hard times,'' it is not so, and cases of actual 
suffering for want of the necessaries of life, nay, of 
actual starvation even in our cfwn country, are no rare 
occurrences. It would be difficult to estimate the 
amount of actual suffering endured by the honest and 
virtuous poor in every one of our larger towns and 
cities, and which neither private nor public charity 
can reach. 

The evil does not stop here. The system ele- 
vates the middling class to wealth, often men who 
began life with poverty. A poor man or a man of 
small means in the beginning become rich by trade, 
speculation, or the successful exploitation of labor, is 
often a greater calamity to society than a wealthy 
man reduced to poverty. An old established nobil- 
ity, with gentle manners, refined tastes, chivalrous 
feelings, surrounded by the prestige of rank, and en- 
deared by the memory of heroic deeds or lofty civic 



256 THE CONVERT. 

virtues, is endurable, nay respectable, and not with- 
out compensating advantages to society in general, 
for its rank and privileges. But the upstart, the 
novus homo, with all the vulgar tastes and habits, 
ignorance and coarseness, of the class from which he 
has sprung, and nothing of the class into which he 
fancies he has risen but its wealth, is intolerable, and 
widely mischievous. He has nothing to sustain him 
but his money, and what money can purchase. He 
enters upon a career of lavish expenditure, and aids 
to introduce an expensive and luxurious style of liv- 
ing destructive of genuine simplicity of manners, and 
of private and social morals. Moral worth and in- 
tellectual superiority count for nothing. Men to be 
of any account in their town or city must be rich, at 
least appear to be rich. The slow gains of patient 
toil and honest industry no longer suffice. There is 
in all classes an impatience to be rich. The most 
daring and reckless speculations are resorted to, and 
when honest means fail, dishonest, nay, criminal 
means are adopted. The man of a moderate income 
cannot live within his means. His wife and daugh- 
ters must have the house new furnished, or a new 



GETTING BETTER. 257 

house taken up town^ and must dress so as to vie 
with the wives and daughters of the millionnaires of 
Fifth Avenue. Nobody is contented to appear what 
he is^ or to enjoy life in the state in which he finds him- 
self All are striving to be, or to appear, what they 
are not, to work their way up to a higher social stra- 
tum, and hence society becomes hollow, a sham, a lie. 
Between the master and the slave, between the 
landlord and the serf, there often grow up pleasant 
personal relations and attachments ; there is personal 
intercourse, kindness, aifability, protection on the one 
side, respect and gratitude on the other, which par- 
tially compensates for the superiority of the one and 
the inferiority of the other ; but the modern system 
of wages allows very little of all this ; the capitalist 
and the workman belong to different species, and 
have little personal intercourse. The agent or man 
of business pays the workman his wages, and there 
ends the responsibility of the employer. The laborer 
has no further claim on him, and he may want and 
starve, or sicken and die, it is his own affair, with 
which the employer has nothing to do. Hence the 
relation between the two classes becomes mercenary, 



258 THE CONVERT. 

hard, and a matter of arithmetic. The one class be- 
comes proud, haughty, cold, supercilious, contempt- 
uous, or at best superbly indiflferent, looking upon 
the laborer as an appendage of his steam-engine, his 
spinning-jenny, or his power-loom, with far less of 
esteem and affection than he bestows on his favorite 
dog or horse ; the other class become envious, discon- 
tented, resentful, hostile, laboring under a sense of 
injustice, and waiting only the opportunity to right 
themselves. The equality of love, of affection, cannot 
come in to make amends for the inequality of prop- 
erty and condition. 

To remedy these evils I proposed to abolish the 
distinction between capitalists and laborers, employer 
and employed, by having every man an owner of the 
funds as well as the labor of production, and thus 
making it possible for every man to labor on a capi- 
tal of his own, and to receive according to his works. 
Undoubtedly my plan would have broken up the 
whole modern commercial system, prostrated all the 
great industries, or what I called the factory system, 
and thrown the mass of the people back on the land 
to get their living by agricultural and mechanical 



GETTING BETTER. 259 

pursuits. I knew this well enough, but this was one 
of the results I aimed at. It was wherefore I op- 
posed the whole banking and credit system, and 
struggled hard to separate the fiscal concerns of the 
government from the moneyed interests of the 
country, and to abolish paper currency. I wished 
to check commerce, to destroy speculation, and for 
the factory system, which we were enacting tariffs 
to protect and build up, to restore the old system of 
real home industry. The business men of the country 
saw as clearly as I did whither my propositions tend- 
ed, and took the alarm, and as the business interests 
rather than the agricultural and mechanical interests 
ruled the minds of my countrymen, I had my labor 
for my pains. I went directly against the dominant 
sentiment of the British and American world, and 
made war on what it holds to be its chief interest and 
its crowning glory. Here was the gravamen of my 
offence. I had dared take Democracy at its word, 
and push its principles to their last logical conse- 
quences ; I had had the incredible folly of treating 
the equality asserted as if it meant something, as if it 
could be made a reality, instead of a miserable sham. 



260 THE CONVERT. 

It was the attacks I made on the modern industrial 
and commercial system, that gave the offence. Mr. 
Bancroft, who had been one of my stanchest friends, 
could not go with me in my views of property, though 
he did not object to my views with regard to the 
Church and the Priesthood. John C. Calhoun of 
South Carolina told me that in what I had said of 
the priests I was right. '' You have,'" he said, " told 
the truth of them. But your doctrine as to the 
descent and distribution of property is wrong, and 
you will do well to re-examine it.^' I was not wrong, if 
the premises from which I reasoned were tenable, and 
I am unable even to-day to detect any unsoundness 
in my views of the relation of capital and labor, or 
of the modern system of money wages. I believe 
firmly even still that the economical system I pro- 
posed, if it could be introduced, would be favorable to . 
the virtue and happiness of society. But I look upon 
its introduction as wholly impracticable, and there- 
fore regard all thought and effort bestowed on it as 
worse than thrown away. We must seek its equiva- 
lent from another source, in another ordejr of ideas, 
set forth and sustained by religion. 



GETTING BETTER. 261 

My political friends, as may well be believed, 
were indignantj if not precisely at my views, at my 
inopportune publication of them. I had injured my 
party, and defeated by my rashness the success of 
its candidates. They came to the conclusion that 
whatever my honesty, my zeal, or ability, I was de- 
ficient in the essential qualities of a party leader. 
In this they were right, but they reasoned from 
wrong premises. I had my own purpose in publish- 
ing my essay on the laboring classes, and what 
they supposed I did from rashness, mere wanton- 
ness, I did with deliberation, with '' malice afore- 
thought/' I have seldom, if ever, published any 
thing in the heat of blood, or without being well 
aware of what I was doing, and I must bear the full 
responsibility of doing it. That is, I have always 
acted from reason, not impulse ; my reason may or 
may not have been a good one, but it always seemed 
to me a good one at the time, and generally was a 
good one from the position I occupied. 

I had at the persuasion of friends given my sup- 
port, such as it was, to the Democratic party, with 
the hope of making that party the instrument of 



262 THE CONVERT. 

carrying out my views. A short experience con- 
vinced me that that hope was chimerical. I was 
convinced of it by the changes I detected taking 
place in myself. I found myself acquiring a promi- 
nent position in the Democratic party^ and in a fair 
way of becoming one of its trusted leaders ; but in 
proportion as I acquired the confidence of the party, 
I found myself less disposed to insist on my doc- 
trines of Social Eeform^ and less and less at liberty 
to be myself, and follow my own convictions. I 
might gain political preferment, I might aspire to 
the highest posts in the State and Nation, and even 
gain them, — at least I had the vanity to believe I 
could, if I chose. The road to them was open and 
plain before me, and I understood as well as any 
other man in the country the means to be used to 
gain them ; but in gaining them I must give up my 
personal freedom and independence, and follow as 
well as lead my party. I felt, too, for a moment, 
the workings of political ambition, and dared no 
longer trust myself. Let me go on as I am going a 
little longer, and I shall forget all my early purposes, 
abandon the work to which I have consecrated my 



GETTING BETTER. 263 

life^ or become so involved in the meshes of party, 
or form so many political relations, that I can no 
longer be free to return to my work without com- 
promising my friends, my party, and perhaps myself. 
The best and shortest way, because the honestest 
and most straight-forward, is, now before I become 
deeper involved, to come out and publish in the 
most startling form possible my whole ulterior 
thought, without circumlocution or reticence. If 
the party accept my views, which of course they 
will not, well and good ; if not, as will be the case, 
the party ties will be broken, and I shall be free to 
publish my honest convictions without fear of com- 
promising any body but myself. I shall be free to 
act as I think proper, unshackled by party obliga- 
tions, or even personal friendships. Such were my 
reasons, avowed to those who shared my confidence, 
before the article was written. For my party the 
act was impolitic, for myself it was necessary and 
prudent. I look back upon it to-day-as the least 
discreditable act I had hitherto performed, and there 
was in it something bordering on moral heroism, 
which has not been without its reward. 



264 THE CONVERT. 

V When I publislied my essay, I supposed it would 
close my literary as well as my political career. But 
the manner in which I was assailed aroused for a 
moment my indignation, and made me resolve, con- 
trary to my original intention, to defend myself, and 
to show that I could more than regain before the 
public the position I had lost. I defended my essay 
at length and with vigor in the following number of 
my Eeview, and silenced the noisy ' clamors raised 
against me. I retained and enlarged my audience, 
and assumed a higher tone and position than I 
had ever before held, though not without making 
the greatest intellectual efforts, and using all the 
arts of popularity I was capable of. I felt in those 
times that to be popular or unpopular is simply a 
matter of one's own choice. In the three years that 
followed I gained more than I had lost, and I never 
stood higher, commanded more of the public atten- 
tion, or had a more promising career open before me, 
than at the moment when I avowed my conversion 
to Catholicity. I did not value reputation for its 
own sake, — I have never done so ; and if I labored to 
recover the ground I had lost, it was simply to 



GETTING BETTER. 265 

prove that I could do so when I chose. It cost me 
not a pang to throw all away on becoming a Catho- 
lic, and to be regarded as henceforth of no account 
by my non- Catholic countrymen, as I did not doubt 
I should be. There is something else than reputa- 
tion worth living for. 

The publication of my Essay on the Laboring 
Classes marked the crisis in my mental disease. In 
it I had made my confession to the public ; I had 
made, as I have already said, a clean breast of it, and 
had no further concealment. I had thrown off a 
heavy load which had been accumulating for years, 
and felt relieved. From that moment a change 
came over the temper of my madness. I had gone 
as far in the direction I was going as I could go. 
I had reached the last stage in that journey, and 
there I must stop, and remain, or retrace my steps. 
I had one principle and only one to which, since 
throwing up Universalism, I had been faithful, a 
principle for which I had perhaps made some sacri- 
fices, that of following my own honest convictions 
whithersoever they should lead me. I had drawn 

from the premises furnished me by my non-Catholic 
12 



266 THE CONVERT. 

and Democratic countrymen their strictly logical 
conclusions, and these same countrymen had recoiled 
from them with horror. Either they are wrong in 
doing so, or their premises are false. Suppose I ex- 
amine these premises, and see if this Protestant and 
Democratic theory of man and society to which the 
world seems tending is not itself founded in error. 

The electioneering campaign of 1840, carried 
on by doggerels, log-cabins, and hard cider, by means 
utterly corrupt and corrupting, disgusted me with 
Democracy as distinguished from Constitutional 
Kepublicanism, destroyed what little confidence I 
had in popular elections, and made me distrust both 
the intelligence and the instincts of " the masses.'' 
I sat down to the scientific study of government, in 
its grounds, its origin, its forms, and its administra- 
tion. I read for the first time Aristotle on Politics ; 
I read the best treatises, ancient and modern, on 
government within my reach ; I studied the consti- 
tutions of Greece and Kome, and their history, the 
political administration of ancient Persia, the feudal 
system, and the constitutions of modern States, in 
the light of such experience and such philosophy as 



GETTING BETTER. 267 

I had, and came to the conclusion that the con- 
dition of liberty is order, and that in this world we 
must seek not equality, but justice. To the main- 
tenance of order in the State, and justice between 
man and man, a firm, strong, and efficient govern- 
ment is necessary. Liberty is not in the absence of 
authority, but in being held to obey only just and 
legitimate authority. Evidently, I had changed 
systems, and had entered another order of ideas. 
Government was no longer the mere agent of society 
as my Democratic masters had taught me, but an 
authority having the right and the power to govern 
society, and direct and aid it, as a wise Providence, 
in fulfilhng its destiny. I became henceforth a con- 
servative in politics, instead of an impracticable 
radical, and through political conservatism I ad- 
vanced rapidly towards religious conservatism. So 
I date my beginning to amend from the publication 
of my so-called " horrible doctrines.'' 



CHAPTEK XIV. 

MAN NO CHURCH-BUILDER. 

I HAD settled it that there is no true liberty without 
order, and no order without a constituted authority. 
Then, since no progress without liberty, my new 
church, necessary to the maintenance of order, in- 
stead of coming after progress and being its result, 
must precede it, and be the condition of effecting it. 
I cannot effect the progress of man and society 
without the new organization. That I settled long 
ago. But how without that progress obtain the new 
organization, or the new church itself.^ 

Here was a problem I had neglected to solve, — 
a problem, too, of no little difficulty. It will be 
easy enough to effect the progress when I have the 
means in my hands, but how am I to get the 
means ? I cannot effect my end, the creation of a 



MAN NO CHURCH-BUILDER. 269 

heaven on earth, without means ; how any more 
without means create my new church, by which I 
am to effect that end ? Whence proceeds the or- 
ganic power to erect the new institution, which is 
to elevate the human race above their present con- 
dition, and to set them forward in an endless career 
of progress ? I have heretofore maintained that 
ideas are potent, and proceeded on the supposition 
that they have the intrinsic force to actualize them- 
selves. Ideas, I was accustomed to say with my 
friend Bronson Alcotf'the American Orpheus, when 
once proclaimed, will take unto themselves hands, 
build the new temple, and instaurate the new wor- 
ship ; but ideas in themselves are not powers, have 
no active force, and can be rendered real and active 
only as clothed with concrete existence by a power 
distinct from themselves. Suppose, then, that I real- 
ly have the true ideas, suppose that I see clearly 
and distinctly what is to be done, it by no means 
follows that I have the power to do it, — to concrete 
the ideas, to actualize them, to embody them in a 
^-eal and living organization of the race. 

Certain it is, that man, speak we of the race or 



270 THE CQNVERT. 

of the individual, has no proper creative power. / He 
can work only on and with materials furnished to 
his hands. The great things he does, he does only by 
availing himself of the great active forces of the uni- 
verse in which he is placed. The forces that propel 
the machinery he constructs are not his own, nor of 
his own creation ; they are forces that already exist, 
and exist and operate without any dependence on 
either his intellect or his will. The water that 
drives his mill, the steam that propels his ship in 
defiance of wind and tide, the electricity that sends 
his messages instantaneously round the globe, and 
brings back an answer, are, all powers created to 
his hand, and he only adapts them to his use. Un- 
doubtedly the power of association is great, but it 
is at best only the sum of the separate powers 
associated. Association generates no new power ; it 
only collects, concentrates, and utilizes the powers 
of the individuals embraced in the association. The 
power of the race is only the power of all men, the 
combined power of the individuals who compose it ; 
for, aside from the individuals, from all men, there 
is no actual man, no actual humanity. The race, as 



MAN NO CHURCH-BUILDER. 271 

distinguished from individuals, is only an idea, only 
ideal, not actual^ man ; for jnan is actual, concrete 
existence only in men. In my new association or 
organization, I may have the sum of the life that 
the race already lives or has attained to, but no aug- 
mentation of life. The organization can, then, give 
me, give the human race itself, nothing ' above what 
we already have. How then, with nothing more 
than what we already have, am I to get my new 
organization, and in it the means and conditions 
of future progress, or of becoming more than we 
are ? 

Man is now below what I would have him, and 
behind the goal I propose for him. I propose his 
progress ; I propose to elevate him in virtue and 
happiness. But if he is below what I would have 
him, how with him alone am I to elevate him ? Man 
is what he is, and with only man, how am I to make 
him, or is he to become more than he now is ? Man 
only equals man. From man I can get only man, and 
with man alone, I have and can have nothing above 
man. No man can rise above himself, or lift himself 
by his own waistband. Archimedes is reported to 



272 THE CONVERT. 

have said, " Give me whereon to stand, and I will 
move the world ; '' but there is no law of mechanics 
by which you can raise a body without something 
distinct from it on which to rest the fulcrum of your 
lever. The ship cleaves its way through the ocean, 
or the bird through the air, only by finding a counter- 
/ pressure or 'resisting force in the fluid cleaved. There 
can be no motion without rest, no movable without 
the immovable. Nothing cannot mal^e itself some- 
thing, and the imperfect without borrowing from 
what is not itself cannot make itself perfect. Ex 
nihilo nihil fit. My new church, then, if it is to ele- 
vate the race and be the means of their progress, must 
embody a power above that which they now have. 
Whence is that power to come ? How am I to obtain 
it, and obtain it as I must, without my new church, 
, and obtain it as the condition of organizing it ? 

Undoubtedly, there is such a phenomenon as 
growth. We see it in vegetables, in animals, in 
man ; but all growth is by accretion, by assimilation 
from abroad. The acorn develops and grows into the 
oak only by virtue of the substance it assimilates 
from the soil, air, and light. It must have food, 



MAN NO CHURCH-BUILDER. 273 

appropriate food, and it is only through assimilating 
the food by a living process determined by the inter- 
nal law of the oak, that it grows and expands into 
the tree. So of the whole animal world. No animal 
can grow or even live by itself alone. Thus is it in 
the material order, as all men know, and concede. 
Else why the necessity of food, of drink ? The spir-\ 
itua] and material correspond, for the material does ' 
in its order but copy or imitate the spiritual. Nei- 
ther in body nor soul, then, can man grow or make 
progress, — for progress is nothing but growth, — with 
himself alone, or without assimilating to himself ap- 
propriate food from abroad. Progress there may be, 
and undoubtedly is, and this progress is effected by 
processes determined by the internal law or nature of 
man, but not without the aid of that which is not 
man. Here I derived no little aid from the writings 

of Pierre Leroux. 

« 

Pierre Leroux, a French philosopher and politician, 
member of the National Assembly in 1848, whose 
name was frequently heard under the Eepublic which 
ended in the present French Empire, in connection 
with the socialists and the Banquets of Love, was 
12* 



274 THE CONVERT. 

originally aflfiliated to the Saint-Simonians, and re- 
tains, or did at my latest information, many of the 
principles of their school. He is a man of learning, 
in whose head ferments a marvellous variety of ideas, 
and who, with the exception of Malebranche, must be 
regarded as the ablest and most original philosopher 
France has produced. As a writer he lacks the re- 
pose, the classic grace, the sustained elegance and 
finish of M. Victor Cousin, but he is free, bold, and 
energetic. His writings are voluminous. For some 
time he edited the Bevue Encyclopedique^ in connec- 
tion with J. Eeynaud. He commenced in 1836 the 
Encyclopedie Nouvelle^ not yet finished ; subse- 
quently he edited in connection with George Sand 
and the late Abbe de Lamennais the Revue Inde- 
pendante, in which George Sand first published her 
Consuelo. He has published a new- French transla- 
tion of Plato, though whether made by him or by 
some of his disciples under his direction, I am not 
informed ; and a remarkable work in its way, entitled 
L'Humomt4. My personal knowledge of his writings 
is confined to this last-mentioned work, to his Refu- 
tation de rEclecticisme, and his articles in the New 



MAN NO CHURCH-BUILDER. 275 

Encyclopedia. He was a fellow-pupil with M. 
Victor Cousin, in L'ficole Normale, and since the 
Kevolution of July, has appeared as his rival and bit- 
ter opponent. 

/ The Refutation de VEclecticisme was first pub- 
lished in 1839, but I first read it in 1841. It had a 
marvellous effect in revolutionizing my own philo- 
sophical views, or rather of emancipating me from 
my subjection to the Eclectic school founded by MM. 
Cousin and Jouffroy. Like most English and Amer- 
icans of my generation, I had been educated in the 
school of Locke. From Locke I had passed to the 
Scottish school of Keid and Stewart, and had ad- 
hered to it without well knowing what it was, till it 
was- overthrown by Dr. Thomas Brown, who in the 
Introductory Lectures to his philosophy revived the 
skepticism of Hume, and drove me into speculative 
Atheism, by resolving cause and effect into invariable 
antecedence and consequence, thus excluding all 
idea of creative power or productive force. Still 
young, I rushed into pure sensism and materialism, 
and was prepared intellectually to join with Frances 
Wright, and her followers, when they appeared. 



276 THE CONVERT. 

Gradually I had elaborated a sort of pWlosopWcal 
sentimentalism, depending on the heart rather than 
the headj hearing some analogy to the tendencies of 
Bernardino St. Pierre, Madame de Stael, Benjamin 
Constant, Chateaubriand, Adam Smith, and the Ger- 
man Jacobi. In this half-dreaming state, with vague 
feelings, and vaguer notions, I encountered the philo- 
sophical writings of M. Cousin, first, I think, in 1833, 
and yielded almost entirely to the witchery of his 
style, the splendor of his diction, the brilliancy of his 
generalizations, and the real power of his genius, 
although I made from first to last certain reserves. 

M. Victor Cousin was born in 1791, and his ori- 
ginal destination was literature ; but captivated by 
the Legons of M. La Bomiguiere and M. Koyer-Col- 
lard, he resolved to devote himself to philosophy. He 
was first repetiteuT and then professor of philosophy 
in the Normal School^ subsequently professor of the 
History of Philosophy in the Faculty of Letters at 
Paris. His first Course, which has been pubKshed, 
was given in 1816, and is most remarkable as the 
production of a young philosopher only twenty-five 
years of age. His Course for the half year of 1828^ and 



MAN NO CHURCH-BUILDER. 277 

his full Course for 1829, and his Fragmens Philoso- 
phiqueSj collected and published in 1826, with an 
elaborate preface, were the first of his writings that 
came into my hands, and they remain as modified in 
subsequent editions his principal philosophical works 
up to the present time. He has edited the works of 
Proclus and Descartes, and the previously unpublished 
works of Abelard, preceded by a history of the Scho- 
lastic Philosophy. He has also published a transla- 
tion into beautiful French,'hardly inferior to the origi- 
nal Greek, of the Complete Works of Plato, with an 
Introduction and Notes to most of the Dialogues, in 
thirteen volumes octavo, with the promise of a new 
Life of the author, and a Critical Judgment of his 
philosophy, which have not yet appeared. Latterly 
he has published a new edition of one of his earlier 
Courses under the title of Le Vrai^ Le Beau, et Le 
Bien—The True, The Beautiful, and The Good, and 
some admirable Studies of the literature of the seven- 
teenth century grouped around Pascal, the Duchess 
de Longueville, Madame de Sabl6, &c. As he grows 
older he seems to turn more towards religious ideas, 
and to manifest less disrespect for Christianity and 



278 THE CONVERT. 

the Church. In politics he is a constitutionalist, or 
what was formerly termed a Doctrinaire^ and under 
the Eepublic of 1848, he acted for the most part with 
the conservative majority. I was not the first of his 
disciples in this country, but I was among his most 
ardent admirers, and perhaps contributed more than 
any other one man to draw the attention of Ameri- 
can thinkers to his philosophy. 

• Gioberti, in a Note of two hundred pages .or more 
to the third volume of his Introduzione alio studio 
della Filosojia^ has pointed out and refuted in a mas- 
terly manner the errors of M. Cousin's doctrine on 
ontology, creation, and moral liberty, but he speaks, 
in my judgment, too slightingly of his philosophical 
genius, as he does also of Leroux's. Whoever has 
read attentively the philosophical writings of the 
illustrious Italian, cannot fail to perceive that he has 
been far more indebted to these two Frenchmen, 
whom he affects to despise, than it pleases him to ac- 
knowledge. Neither can I agree with the Italian 
that Jouffroy, the most distinguished of M. Cousin's 
early disciples, had a truer and loftier philosophical 
genius than his master. Yet Jouffroy, who died too 



MAN NO CHURCH-BUILDER. 279 

young for philosophy, or for his own fame, was no 
doubt a superior man, a clear, systematic, and logical 
thinker, with an amiable disposition and a transpa- 
rent soul, who never ceased to regret the loss of his 
early Catholic faith, which I would gladly believe he 
recovered before his death ; but he never rose above 
the Scottish school, and died uttering his protest 
against philosophy. His great merit, and the high- 
est proof he gave of his philosophical genius, was in 
perceiving the worthlessness of the philosophy he 
had been teaching, and its vast inferiority to the Cat- 
echism he had rejected. He had not, however, the ! 
genius that penetrates through the mass of errors [ 
and seizes the great, living, and eternal truth which ■ 
so many philosophers misapprehend, misinterpret, 
and misapply. But be all this as it may, I acknowl- 
edge willingly my indebtedness in philosophy to both 
M. Victor Cousin, and to M. Theodore Jouifroy, 
who have served me hardly less by their errors than 
by their truths. 

M. Cousin had labored to combine the method of 
the psychologists with that of the new G-erman school 
of Schelling and Hegel. He starts with the facts of 



280 THE CONVERT. 

consciousness, and professes by careful observation and 
rigid induction to rise to the ideas of the True, the 
Beautiful, and the Good, and then, from these neces- 
sary, absolute ideas, as he calls them, to descend to 
the region of psychology, and by their light to verify 
anew the facts of consciousness, previously analyzed. 
But these absolute ideas, what are they ? M. Cousin 
makes them the constituent elements of reason. But 
of what reason ? The Divine, or the human ? If 
of the Divine, how does our intelligence grasp them ? 
If of the human, how determine their objective va- 
lidity, or, to use the language of the schoolmen, 
their existence a parte rei ? M. Cousin's answer is 
confused and unsatisfactory. Eeason, he maintains, 
is indeed constituted by these ideas ; they are its 
constituent elements ; but the reason they constitute 
is the spontaneous and impersonal reason, not our 
personal or reflective reason. Therefore these abso- 
lute ideas are objective in relation to our personality^ 
that is to say, to our principle of voluntary activity, 
le moty the me. But what is this impersonal, spon-1 
taneous reason, operating without our voluntary ac-j 
tivity ? Is it essentially distinct from the personal 



MAN NO CHURCH-BUILDER. 281 

or reflective reason ? M. Cousin tells us that it is 
not ; that there are not two reasons ; that sponta- 
neity and reflection are simply two modes in which 
one and the same reason operates. Then this one 
reason^ is it objective^ or subjective ? Is it the Di- 
vine Reason, or is it a faculty of the human soul ? 

M. Cousin maintains that it is the Divine reason 
and at the same time a faculty of the human soul. 
But here is a grave difficulty.* How make the Di- 
vine reason, indistinguishable from the Divine being 
or essence, a human faculty, and therefore essentially 
human, without identifying God and man, and fall- 
ing into pure pantheism, or pure atheism ? To 
escape this difficulty, M. Cousin attempts to distin- 
guish between God and reason, between the Divine 
Being and the Logos, and to present the Divine rea- 
son, not as God, but as the Word of God. In this, 
however, he misapprehends the Christian dogma of 
the Trinity, on which he professes to found his dis- 
tinction, and falls into a grave ontological error. In 
the Christian dogma of the Trinity, the distinction 
of being is denied, and the Logos is asserted to be 
one in essence with the Father. Besides, the Logos, 



282 THE CONVERT. 

if not one in essence with God, and therefore really 
and truly God, is creature ; for between God and 
creature there is no middle existence. What is not 
creature is God, and what is not God is creature. If 
your spontaneous reason is God, then you make God 
and man identical ; if you distinguish it from God, 
you make it creature, simply human reason, a faculty 
of the human soul, and therefore remain still in the 
region of psychology. Your absolute ideas are only 
subjectively absolute, and the inquiry returns. How 
establish their objectivity, or existence a parte rei? 
This question M. Cousin has never to my knowl- 
edge answered, and therefore has never really ad- 
vanced beyond the subjectivism of Kant, which, else- 
where, he so effectually refutes. It was always an 
objection in my mind to his philosophy. His abso- 
lute ideas of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, 
which he labors to identify with God, were after all, 
on his hypothesis, only abstractions, and could give 
me only an abstract God, and no living God, no real 
God at all. Here Leroux, who is regarded by not a 
few as an atheist, and who does fall, in his Humanit^^ 
into the Hegelian pantheism, came to my aid, by 



MAN NO CHURCH-BUILDER. 283 

directing my attention to the simple analysis of 
thought, or to what M. Cousin calls " the fact of con- 
sciousness." M. Cousin himself had said, thought, 
or the fact of consciousness, is a phenomenon with 
three elements, subject, object, and their relation. 
The subject is always le moi or the thinker, the ob- 
ject is always le non-moi, or something standing 
over against the subject, and independent of it ; and 
the relation is the form of the thought. M. Leroux 
adopts this and shows that thought is a synthesis 
and the resultant of two .factors. The subject 
cannot think without the concurrence of the object, 
and the object cannot be thought without the con- 
currence of the subject, or thinker. The subject 
and object are both given simultaneously in one and 
the same thought, or act, and therefore the reality 
of the one is as certain as that of the other. The 
object affirms itself in the fact of consciousness as 
object, as distinct from, and independent of, the sub- 
ject, and the subject recognizes itself as subject, as 
thinker, and therefore as distinct from and opposed 
to the object. This stripped philosophy of its mys- 
tery, divested it of its endless abstractions and vain 



284 THE CONVEKT. 

subtilties^ and harmonized it with the common sense 
of mankind. 

. / Man cannot think without an object^ and being 
finite he can never be his own object. Only God can 
be the object of his own intelligence^ or be intelligent 
without other than himself ; man, whatever else he 
is, is a dependent being, and is in no instance, in no 
respect, alone sufficient for himself. He is not in- 
telligent in himself, because he is not intelligible in 
himself. There is and can be no intelligence where 
there is no intelligible, or nothing that can be 
known. We cannot see where there is nothing to 
be seen. What is not is not intelligible. That 
which does not exist cannot be an object of thought ; 
for it is not, and therefore cannot present any thing 
to the mind, can present no resistance or counter- 
pressure to the mental force. The object then is 
always real, and no thought ever is or ever can be 
totally false or purely subjective. A further ques- 
tion may be raised, indeed, as to the light by which 
the object is thought, or as to the intelligible medi- 
um of thought, — a question which Malebranche at- 
tempted to solve by what he called '' vision in God,'' 



MAN NO CHURCH-BUILDER. 285 

and which M. Cousin comes near solving in asserting 
that absolute ideas are intuitive. But M. Cousin 
fails precisely where Plato before him failed, by not 
distinguishing the idea as archetype in the Divine 
Reason from idea as the essence or reality of the 
thing, regarded as the object of our science. He 
fails to distinguish reason as Divine from reason as 
a human faculty, and to point out the real relation 
which subsists between them. He makes only a 
modal distinction, which is not sufficient to save him 
from pantheism, and fails to perceive that the Di- 
vine Reason is the human reason only through the 
medium of the Divine creative act, — mediante actu 
creativo divino. The Divine Reason, indistinguish- 
able from the Divine Essence or Being, at once cre- 
ates the human reason and presents itself as its light 
and its immediate object. We see all things in 
God, as we see visible objects in the light which 
illuminates them, though not simply as ideas in the 
Divine mind, as Malebranche appears to have held ; 
for we see existences themselves in their concrete- 
ness and reality, not merely their ideas, or possibility 
of being created. 



286 THE CONVERT. 

Having settled it, that man does not suffice for 
himself in the intellectual order, that he cannot 
even think himself without thinking what is not 
himself, or without the concurrence of the object 
with the subject, I learned from Leroux, that the 
same principle extends to all our acts, and that no 
act of life is possible without the concurrence of the 
object. Man lives and can live only by communion 
with what is not himself. In himself alone, cut off 
from all not himself, he is neither a progressive nor 
a living being. His body must have food from with- 
out, and so must his heart and his soul. Hence his 
elevation, his progress, as well as his very existence, 
depend on the object. He cannot lift himself, but 
must be lifted, by placing him in communion with a 
higher and elevating object. 

This will be the more evident, if we bear in 
mind, that the fact, any fact, of human life is the 
joint product of the subject and object, and there- 
fore partakes of the character of each. This is a 
fact of no inconsiderable importance, and enables us 
to explain many things certain from observation, 
from human experience, but which philosophy has 



MAN NO CHURCH-BUILDER. 287 

hitherto failed to explain. '^ Evil communications ' 
corrupt good manners/' is a proverb as old as human 
experience, but has philosophy hitherto explained 
it ? Why is it that association with the great and 
good improves our manners and our morals ? I 
meet a great and good man ; I hold intercourse or 
communion with him, and am never after what I 
was before. I feel that a virtue has gone forth from 
him, and entered into my life, so that I am not, and 
n^ver can be again, the man I was before I met 
him. What is the explanation of this fact ? How 
happens it that I am benefited by my intercourse 
with the' good, and injured by my intercourse with the 
bad ? How is it that one man is able to influence 
another, whether for good or for evil ? What is the 
meaning of influence itself.^ Influence, inflowing, 
flowing-in, — what is this but the very fact I assert, 
that our life is the joint product of subject and ob- 
ject ? Man lives, and can live only by communion 
with that which is not himself This must be said 
of every living dependent existence. Only God can 
live in, from, and by himself alone, uninfluenced, 
and unaffected by any thing distinguishable from his 



288 THE CONVERT. 

own being. But man is not God, is not being in' 
himself, is not complete being, and must find out of 
himself both his being and its completeness. He 
lives not in and from himself alone, but does and 
must live in and by the life of another, 
y Cut off man from all communion with external 
nature, and he dies, for he has no sustenance for 
his body, and must starve ; cut him off from all 
communion with moral nature, and he dies, starves, 
morally ; cut him off from all moral communion 
with a life above his own, and he stagnates, and can 
make no progress. All this every body knows and 
concedes. Then to elevate man, to give him a 
higher and nobler life, you must give him a higher 
and nobler object, a higher and nobler life with 
which to commune. To elevate his subjective 
life, you must elevate his objective life. From 
the object must flow into him a higher virtue, an 
elevating element. Thus far I followed Leroux, 
but I did not and could not follow him in all his 
applications of the great principle he had helped me 
to gi-asp and understand. He sought to apply the 
principle in an un-Christian sense ; I saw, or thought I 



MAN NO CHURCH-BUILDER. 289 

saw, in it the means of placing myself more in har- 
mony with the common beliefs of Christendom^ 
without violence to my reason. 

'' Man/' said Leroux, '^ lives by communion with 
his object, — with nature, with his fellow-men, and 
with God. He communes with nature through prop- 
erty, with his fellow-men through family and the 
State, and with God through Humanity.'' In the first 
two statements he is right, and asserts a solid basis 
for property, family, and the State, three institutions 
which are indispensable to human life^ and which, 
however they may be warred against, are really as 
indestructible as human nature itself. But in the 
third statement he adds nothing, for to commune 
with God through Humanity is nothing else than to 
commune with our kind, or with other men in the 
family and the State. Man can live, and the ma- 
jority of men do live, with only the first two com- 
munions named, but he can so live only the life of 
the human animal, — an unprogressive life, which 
can never rise to the Divine. Leroux knew this, 
and as he believed firmly in progress, i^ the progres- 
siveness of the race, nay, of nature, indeed of all 
13 



290 THE CONVERT. 

natures, lie asserted as its condition, communion 
with God ; but as lie conceived God as actual only 
in existences, he asserted for us only the communion 
with God through Humanity, which was in effect 
simply no communion with God at all, and supplied 
and could supply no objective element to our life 
above that which we already have, and cannot as 
men but have. 

Leroux never fairly understood his own philoso- 
phy. His analysis of thought had given him the 
foundation of true realism in opposition to the Kan- 
tian subjectivism or idealism ; but the moment he 
had finished his analysis of thought, and proved to 
us that the life of every man is the joint product of 
subject and object, and therefore partaking alike of 
the character of each, he fell into the precise error 
which I have pointed out in the case of Cousin, that 
of confounding the ideal with the real. He even 
went farther, and asserted, in violation of his whole 
ontology, the power of the ideal, which he himself 
identifies with the possible, to realize or actualize 
itself, — the very error I had detected in myself, and 
which he more than any other had enabled me to 



MAN NO CHURCH-BUILDER. 291 

detect. Subsequently, I believe, in his refutation of 
Hegel, he professes to refute this error ; but in his 
Befutation of Eclecticism^ and his huge work on 
Humanity^ he asserted God as the Void of the Bud- 
hists, the infinite possibility of the universe, which 
the universe is continually actualizing, and hence 
its progress. Yet he had asserted direct intuition of 
God, that we think God, and God must really be 
or we could not think him. 

All the contradiction or absurdity of his theology 
I did not at the moment perceive, because my mind 
was taken up with his doctrine that human life is the 
resultant of two forces, of the intercommunion of 
subject and object, from which I drew a further con- 
clusion than that drawn by Leroux himself. I drew 
from it the conclusion that man is not and cannot 
be in himself progressive, and that his progress de- 
pends on the objective element of his life, or, in 
other words, on his living in communion with God, 
and not only in a natural communion, as held by 
Leroux, but also in a supernatural communion. If 
God vouchsafes us no communion with him, but 
that which we have with him in our own natures 



292 THE CONVERT. 

and the natural objects in relation with which 
we are placed^ we cannot advance beyond or rise 
above what we are, for of that communion we have 
never for a moment been deprived, and never could 
have been deprived. God, as the divine object of 
our life, must present himself in a higher order, or 
we are not elevated above or advanced beyond what 
we already are. I was (^ibliged, then, either to give 
up all my hopes of progress, or abandon my doctrine 
of no God but the God in man, or the identity of 
the human and the Divine. I must recognize God 
as superior to Humanity, independent of nature, 
and intervening as Providence in human affairs, and 
giving us, so to speak, more of himself, than he gives 
in nature. Here, though still far enough from the 
truth, I had entered into the order of religious ideas, 
and was headed, for the first time in my life, in the 
direction of real Christian beliefs, and began to sus- 
pect that I might believe as the Christian world had 
always believed, without abandoning my reason, or 
doing it the least violence. This filled me with an 
inexpressible joy. I need not always stand alone, and 
pine in vain for sympathy with my kind. I, too, 
may one day enter the brotherhood of believers. 



CHAPTEE XV. 

PKOVIDENTIAL MEN. 

Pierre Leroux was not, like myself, wholly igno- 
rant of Catholic theology, and he was able to give 
me some glimpses of what is called by my Puseyite 
friends ^^the Sacramental System.'' He knew the 
Catholic doctrine of grace, and made nse of it in 
explaining his doctrine of progress. His aim was 
to find a philosophical equivalent for the infused 
habits of grace, asserted by the Church, but rejected by 
all classes of Protestants, and which I had not at that 
time even so much as heard of ; but in his effort to 
do this, and to show that what Catholics mean by in- 
fused habits, is attainable by the natural communion 
of man with man, or of the individual with the race, 
he enabled me to see that grace might be infused, in 
accordance with the law of all life, and without the 
slightest violence to nature or reason. 



294 THE CONVERT. 

According to the law of all dependent life, man 
lives not by himself alone, but, by communion with an 
object not himself ; and his actual life partakes alike 
of the object and the subject, of which it is the 
joint product. In the fact of life the object is not 
passive, but active, as active, to say the least, as 
the subject ; for if purely passive, it would offer no 
counteraction to the subject, and be practically no 
object at all. The object acts on the subject no 
less than the subject on the object. They mutually 
act and react on each other, and in their mutual ac- 
tion and reaction the fact of life is generated. The 
object by its action flows into the subject, and becomes 
a real element of the life of the subject. If, then, we 
suppose the object supernaturaUy elevated, the 
life of the subject will be elevated also, and his 
progress secured. Now, as I held that the Divine, 
though distinguishable in reality from the human, 
could flow into us only through the human, I saw 
that by a Providential elevation of individuals by 
the Creator to an extraordinary or supernatural com- 
munion with himself, they would live a divine life, 
and we by communion with them would also be ele- 



PROVIDENTIAL MEN, 295 

vated, and live a higher and more advanced life. 
Thus the elevation and progress of the race would 
be provided for in accordance with the law of life, 
by the aid of these individuals Providentially ele- 
vated, and called by Leroux, '^ Providential Men/' 

In this, though I had by no means reached the 
Catholic thought, I was enabled to conceive the 
natural and the supernatural as corresponding one 
to the other, and that it is possible for God to afford 
us supernatural aid without violence to our natures, 
and without suspending, superseding, or impairing the 
laws of our natural life. This, to one who had been 
accustomed to hold that nature and grace, reason 
and revelation, can be asserted only as mutually re- 
pugnant one to the other, that the one cannot be 
asserted, as Calvinism, indeed all Evangelicalism had 
taught me, without denying the other, was no slight 
advance. Moreover, it placed me in harmony with 
the universal belief of the race, for the human race 
has universally attributed all its elevation and pro- 
gress to God through inspired Prophets, Apostles, 
Messiases, — in a word. Providential Men, or men 
raised up and extraordinarily endowed by the Crea- 



296 THE CONVERT. 

tor^ to aid his creature man in his ceaseless march 
through the ages. In an essay on Conservatism and 
Reform^ published January, 1842, but written in 
the previous November, I say : — 

"^ Errors are peculiar to no one class of men. 
They who are called Eeformers and they who are 
called Conservatives both err, not because they ad- 
vocate or oppose progress, but in their adoption and 
application of means to obtain the end common to 
them all./ They are all brethren ; their faces are real- 
ly all the same way ; but they all, in no small degree, 
mistake the most effectual means of setting human- 
ity forward. Our Transcendental theologians, save 
so far as they are animated by an intenser zeal than 
their opponents, are no more the party of the future, 
are no more reformers than the others. They err by 
mistaking, in no small degree, both the end and the 
means. Their merit consists in their assertion of 
the inspiration of all men, and thereby declaring 
that all men stand in intimate relation with their 
Maker. / This is a great and glorious truth, but by 
no means the whole truth. /Their opponents in re- 
jecting this truth are wrong, and are mischievous in 



PROVIDENTIAL MEN. 297 

their influence. But these opponents contend for 
another truth equally great, and equally, if not more 
essential, — the special inspiration of individual mes- 
sengers, as the Providential agents of the progress 
of the human race. 

"The tendency of the Transcendental theolo- 
gians is to overlook the agency of these special mes- 
sengers, these Providential men, and to assert the 
sufficiency of the inspiration common to all men^ 
Hence Bibles and Messiahs are to them but natural 
occurrences, and entitled to no special reverence or 
authority. Through the aid of Bibles and Messiahs 
they have grown so large, that they fancy Bibles 
and Messiahs are no longer necessary, — nay, that 
they were never necessary. We have no sympathy 
with this tendency. Undoubtedly all men stand in 
intimate relation with their Maker ; undoubtedly all 
men are inspired, for all men love ; undoubtedly 
many of the great essential elements of religious 
faith have been so far assimilated to the life of hu- 
manity as to be now natural religion, and therefore 
no longer needing, with the more advanced nations 

of the earth, a positive supernatural revelation either 
13- 



298 THE CONVERT. 

to assert them or to confirm their authority ; but 
after all it is mainly through the agency of specially 
inspired and extraordinarily endowed individuals, 
that the race itself is improved, and through Bibles, 
Prophets, Messiahs, Kevelators, that it has attained 
its present growth. God is nearer to us than Tran- 
scendental theology teaches. He is near us not 
merely in the fixed and uniform laws of nature, but 
also in his Providence, taking free and voluntary 
care of us, and tempering all events to our strength 
and convictions. God is not a resistless fate, an 
iron destiny, inaccessible to human prayers, which 
no tears, no entreaties, no contrition can move ; but 
a merciful Father, who hears when his children cry, 
and is ready, able, and willing to supply all their 
wants. True, we see him not, know him not, save 
in his manifestations, save in the efi"ects he pro- 
duces, and so far as by his power and love he enters 
into his creatures. But this we know, that we have 
never sought help of him in vain, and have never 
gone to him with a broken and contrite spirit with- 
out finding relief. We see a special as well as a 
general Providence in the history of individuals and 



PROVIDENTIAL MEN. 299 

of the race. All is not the result of natural ten- 
dencies. Moses^ no doubt, embodies in himself all 
the tendencies of his people, but how much more ! 
These tendencies did not produce him and his legis- 
lation, for ages on ages were needed for his people 
to come up to his level, to reach the point where his 
legislation must cease to be an Ideal for humanity. 
The absurdest of all theories is that which would 
make Moses the natural production of his age and 
people, and that people utterly incapable of compre- 
hending him, so sunk in ignorance as the moment 
his presence was withdrawn, to fall down and wor- 
ship a golden calf. 

^^We have, indeed, no sympathy with Jew- 
ish exclusiveness, none with the doctrine which 
teaches that God disinherited all nations but the 
Jewish, and we may add, just as little with the 
modem doctrine, that, 

* Out from tlie heart of Nature roIPd 
The burdens of the Bible Old ; 
The Litanies of Nations came, 
Like the Volcano's tongue of flame, 
Up from the burning core below, — 
The Canticles of Love and Woe.' 



300 THE CONVERT. 

" This is to mistake the effect for the cause. 
These litanies came not from the ^burning core 
below/ but they came from God^ and kindled that 
' burning core.' They originated not in the human 
heart, sprang not from the efforts of the soul to utter 
or to satisfy its own inherent wants ; but they came 
from abroad, to create in the soul a deep want for 
God, and to make the heart and the flesh cry out for 
the living God. Tell us not that nature ,has pro- 
duced the Bible. Man has not degenerated ; he 
lives in as close communion with nature as ever, — 
has the same senses, the same soul, the same 
' burning core," and yet out from his heart no Bible 
rolls its ' burdens.^ 

" Christianity is no natural production. It had, 
no doubt, its reason in the age in which it was born ; 
it was, no doubt, that to which all preceding pro- 
gress pointed, which all the previous tendencies of 
the race demanded as their fulfilment ; but if it 
was the mere natural and inevitable result of pre- 
vious development of the human race, why appeared 
it not first where that development was most mani- 
fest ? Why was not its first appearance in Athens, 



PKOVIDENTIAL MEN. 301 

Kome, or Alexandria, the Temples, the Mysteries, 
or the Schools, instead of a by-corner of the world, 
in an obscure hamlet, in the person of an obscure 
peasant, followed by humble fishermen and despised 
publicans ? Had the tendencies of the age reached 
farthest, and become most manifest, the develop- 
ment of the race most advanced with the fishermen 
and boatmen of the Lake of Genesereth ? Un- 
doubtedly Christianity was the last word of Oriental 
and Grecian philosophies, a word for the utterance 
of which all previous Providences had been prepar- 
ing the way, but a word which none but God could 
utter ; and not tiU he had uttered it in thunder 
tones from his dwelling in the heavens, and his well- 
beloved Son had echoed it from the cross and the 
tomb, could the nations hear it, and leap at the 
sound/' 

" Nor let it be supposed that in clinging to the 
Bible and to Jesus, men are mere conservatives, 
that they have no aspirations. Some of the truths 
of the Bible have been assimilated, a portion, if we 
may so speak, of the Divine life of Jesus, has be- 
come the life of Christendom. Some portion of the 



302 THE CONVERT. 

Christian Ideal has been realized. But not all. 
There are depths in that old Hebrew book which no 
human plummet has sounded ; heights in the life 
of Jesus which no human imagination has scaled. 
In contending for the Christianity of the Bible and 
of Jesus^ we are not looking back, but forward ; for 
we are contending for truths far, far in advance of 
our age. Here is the truth of those who war 
against what is called Transcendental theology. 
They see, as well they may, in the rich store-houses 
of the Gospel, of the Bible, of Christ, enough for 
the warmest heart, the profoundest intellect, the 
loftiest aspiration. Their error, if error they have, 
is in misinterpreting Christianity, in not being true 
to the law they acknowledge, in not laboring with 
suflScient faith and energy to realize the Ideal of 
Christ. They are hearers, and not doers of the 
word. They are as the man who seeth his face in a 
glass, and then goeth away and forget teth what 
manner of man he was. Let them really bring out 
the Christian Ideal, and labor with energy and zeal 
to form Christ, the hope of glory, in the individual 



PROVIDENTIAL MEN. 303 

and in the race, and they will be true and efficient 
reformers. Their works will live after them. 

'' Nor, again, let it be supposed that they who 
cling to the authority of revelation, are necessarily 
inimical to the rights of the mind, or to progress in 
the knowledge of truth. The Christian Ideal, so 
far as realized, needs no foreign authority. The 
human mind is equal to it. But what is the 
authority for that Ideal so far as it is as yet unreal- 
ized ? The individual reason ? Alas ! we have 
seen enough of mere individual reason. It is impo- 
tent when it has not for its guide and support the 
reason of God, speaking not only to the heart, but 
through revelations and the traditions of the race. 
The great doctrine we are laboring to establish, 
the reforms we would effect, we confess our inability 
to demonstrate by mere individual reason. We ask 
for them both on our own account and on account of 
others, a higher authority than mere individual rea- 
son. That reason may be sufficient for here and 
there one ; but how can it suffice for the ignorant, 
the bigoted, the superstitious, the incredulous, the 
wicked, — the men in whom conscience slumbers, 



304 THE CONVERT. 

love sleeps^ and only the world with its impurities is 
awake ? Alas ! man's word is impotent to arouse 
them, man's authority too weak to command even 
their attention. They may speculate with us, or 
debate with us, but not act with us, not live with us 
for God or for man. You must go to them with a 
higher authority than your own, speak to them in a 
Name above all names, and which they dare not 
resist, or your preaching and efforts will be fruitless. 
Deprive the preacher of the authority of God, let 
him go forth in his own name, not as the messenger 
of God, and men will laugh at his truths, and mock 
at his most earnest expostulations. No. They are 
sorry reformers who would reduce God to nature, 
and the authority of his word to that of the indi- 
vidual reason, varying with every individual, and 
with every age.'' 

I was far enough from being free from grievous 
errors, and as yet had not once thought of seeking 
the old Church ; but it is clear that I had made some 
progress, and had embraced, without ceasing to ex- 
ercise my reason freely, or failing in my pledge to 
myself, of being faithful to my own rational nature. 



PROVIDENTIAL MEN. 305 

the great priDciples and facts which placed me on 
the route to the Catholic Church. I found I could 
reasonably accept the ideas of Providence, special as 
well as general, supernatural inspiration, supernatu- 
ral revelation^ and Christianity as an authoritative 
religion, and must do so, or be false alike to history 
-and my hopes of progress. I felt as I had felt from 
my boyhood, that I had need of an authoritative re- 
ligion, and that a religion which does not and cannot 
speak with Divine authority, is simply no religion at 
all. 

I did not, indeed, conclude from the possibility of 
the Providential men I asserted, that they have 
actually been raised up and sent ; I did not from the 
fact that Grod can give us the needed supernatural aid 
through them, without violence to nature and reason, 
and in accordance with the great law of all life, con- 
clude that therefore he actually does so give it. I 
never yet was so poor a logician as to do that. I was 
always ready and anxious to believe, providing I could 
see my way clear to do so without violence to reason, 
or the abnegation of my own manhood ; I never want- 
ed reasons for believing ; what I wanted was to have 



306 THE CONVERT. 

the real or imaginary obstacles to believing removed ; 
more than this, I never needed, never sought, and 
therefore, precisely as were removed my reasons 
against believing, I believed. 

Most people, born and reared in Christian coun- 
tries, who reject Christianity, are very much in the 
condition I was. They reject Christianity, not be- 
cause they see no good reasons for believing, but be- 
cause they see, or think they see, many and stronger 
reasons against believing. They refuse to believe, 
because they do not understand how supernatural as- 
sistance can be rendered without violence to nature, 
or an authoritative revelation, or a revelation that is 
to be regarded as authority for reason, can be accept- 
ed and submitted to without an abandonment of rea- 
son. Such had been the case with me, and conse- 
quently, as this obstacle to believing was removed, 
I believed without seeking any further reason for be- 
lieving. 

This was not wholly irrational, or unphilosophical. 
To believe is normal, to disbelieve is abnormal. When 
the mind is in its normal state, nothing more is ever 
needed for belief than the removal of the obstacles 



PROVIDENTIAL MEN. 307 

interposed to believing ; for, if we consider it, the 
mind was created for truth. Truth is its object, and 
it seeks and accepts it instinctively, as the new-born 
child seeks the mother's breast, from which it draws 
its nourishment. Place the mind and truth face to 
face, with nothing interposed between them, and the 
truth evidences itself to the mind, and the mind ac- 
cepts it, without seeking or needing any further rea- 
son. The assent termed knowledge follows immedi- 
ately from the joint 'forces of the intelligible object 
and the intelligent subject. So in belief. Practically, 
it is never a reason for believing, but the removal of 
reasons against believiug, that is demanded. Hence, 
we always believe what a man tells us, when we 
have no reason for not believing him, and the business 
of life could not go on were it otherwise. For belief 
reason never requires any thing but the mutual pres- 
ence, with nothing interposed between them, of the 
credible object and the creditive subject. 

I held then, as I hold now, that the office of proof 
or even demonstration, is negative rather than affirm- 
ative. Neither ever goes farther than to remove the 
prohibentia^ or obstacles to assent. Demonstration^ 



308 THE CONVERT. 

the most rigid and the most conclusive, only shows 
the object without envelope or disguise, and motives 
assent only by removing every reason for not assent- 
ing. The assent itself is always immediate and in- 
tuitive. Truth needs no voucher, and when imme- 
diately presented to the mind, evidences or affirms 
itself. The will may be perverse, and withdraw the 
intellect from the contemplation of truth^ prejudice 
or passion may darken the understanding, so that it 
does not for the moment see or recognize the object, 
but whenever the truth is immediately present, and 
reason looks it full in the face, it knows that it is 
truth without further evidence, without any thing 
extrinsic to prove that it is truth. To deny this 
would be to deny to the soul the faculty of intelli- 
gence, the faculty of knowing at all. To know a 
thing is to know that it is true, for nothing but truth 
is or can be an object of knowledge. To say that you 
know a thing, and yet do not know whether it be true 
or not, is only saying that you do not know the thing 
at all. No man does or can know falsehood, for false- 
hood is nothing, is a nullity, a mere negation, and 
therefore no intelligible object. Falsehood is intelli- 



PROVIDENTIAL MEN. 309 

gible only in the truth it denies, and is known only 
in knowing that truth. In so far as any proposition 
is false, it is unintelligible, and never known. In all 
errors we know only the element of truth which they 
contain, and the part of error is simply the part of 
our ignorance, the part in which nothing is known. 
To know something, and to know it to be true, is one 
and the same thing ; and this is what is meant when 
we say truth is the object of the intellect. Hence, 
no logical process is ever needed to prove to the mind 
that the object it immediately apprehends is truth, 
or is true. That it is true or truth is included in the 
fact that the mind apprehends it as its object, or 
knows it. To suppose the contrary, to suppose that 
a logical process is needed to demonstrate that the 
object in immediate relation to the mind is true, would 
be absurd ; for it would demand an infinite series of 
logical processes to every single act of knowledge or 
mental assent. There is no reasoning except from 
premises or principles, and no valid reasoning from 
either false or unknown principles. How are these 
premises or principles to be obtained ? Not by rea- 
soning, not by a logical process, for without them no 



310 THE CONVERT. 

reasoning, no logical process is possible, and no such 
tiling as proof or demonstration conceivable. They 
must, then, precede reasoning, be intuitive, that is, 
evident of themselves. Then nothing is necessary, 
in the last analysis, to knowledge, but the immediate 
presence to each other of the intelligible object and 
the intelligent subject. So is it in the case of knowl- 
edge or science in the natural order, where the object 
is immediately intelligible to reason. 

The principle must hold true, as far as applica- 
ble, in the supernatural order, and in regard to faith 
as well as in regard to science. Faith or belief is 
assent to propositions not immediately known, on the 
authority affirming them ; that is, it is assent on tes- 
timony. The understanding does not assent to them 
because it sees immediately their truth, as in case of 
science or knowledge, but because it sees the suffi- 
ciency of the authority or testimony affirming them. 
The immediate object of belief is the veracity of 
the witness, or the fact that the authority in the case 
can neither deceive nor be deceived ; and here the 
assent is immediate as soon as the obstacles are re- 
moved, because to believe is normal. If the super- 



PROVIDENTIAL MEN. 311 

natural and the natural correspond one to the other, 
as it is here assumed that they do, the same holds* 
true of belief in the supernatural order. We cannot 
believe the supernatural things revealed without what 
are called motives of credibility ; but these motives 
do not, so to speak, motive the assent of the mind to 
the veracity or sufficiency of the authority affirming 
them, they only show that the authority is credible, 
that is, remove all the reason we may have or ima- 
gine we have, for regarding it as incredible, or un- 
trustworthy. The assent to its veracity or sufficiency, 
when these reasons are removed, is immediate, by the 
joint forces of the credible object and creditive subject 
as in the natural order. My conduct, then, in be- 
lieving in the supernatural order the moment my 
reasons against believing in it were removed, and I 
saw its accordance with nature and reason, was not 
rash, or precipitate, but truly reasonable and philo- 
sophical, in accordance with the principle of all be- 
lief, and, indeed, of all science. I asked, and I needed 
nothing more. 

My doing so was justified, also, by the view which 
I then took, and still take, of the inspiration of the 



312 THE CONVERT. 

human race. I held that the race lives by immedi- 
?ite communion with God, therefore inspired by him, 
and hence in its normal state aspires to him. Man 
lives by immediate communion with God as his object, 
and therefore the objective element of his Ufe is divine, 
and through this objective element his life is the life 
of God. Man thus in his natural life even partakes 
of God, and this partaking of God I called inspira- 
tion. I did not mean by this that the race is super- 
naturally inspired ; I only meant what the Scrip- 
tures say, that " there is a spirit in men, and the in- 
spiration of the Almighty giveth understanding,'' or 
in other words, that man is intelligent, is a rational 
existence, only by virtue of the immediate presence 
of God, simultaneously the creator, the object, and 
the light of his reason. This is the doctrine I now 
hold, and which I am supposed to have borrowed 
from Gioberti, but which I held before Gioberti had 
published it, and long before I had seen his writings 
or heard his name. Cousin and Leroux had held 
something like it, but made it, in their explanation of 
it, a pantheistic doctrine. They did not distinguish 
with sufficient care between the human reason and 



PROVIDENTIAL MEN. 313 

the reason of God, and while they made the immedi- 
ate presence of God in the sonl the condition of our in- 
telligence, they did not regard that presence as creat- 
ing our reason, or faculty of intelligence, and becoming 
immediately in the act of creating it, its object and its 
light ; but left it to be inferred that it is God him- 
self who knows and loves in us, which is virtually 
pantheism. I distinguished where they did not, and 
held that it is not God who knows and loves in us, 
but God in us who creates in us our power to know, 
and to love. The Divine Eeason is not oar reason, 
but, so to speak, the reason of our reason. It creates 
our reason, and is its immediate light and object. 
This doctrine is well known to the theologians under 
the names of the presence of God in all his works, 
and the Divine concurrence in all the acts of his crea- 
tures. All theologians teach that it is in God we live, 
and move, and are, and that his reason is the light of 
our reason. Hence St. John, speaking of the Word or 
Logos, one with God, says, he was " the true light 
which enlighteneth every man coming into this world." 
Saying with Eliu in the Book of Job, " There is 
a spirit in men, and the inspiration of the Almighty 



314 THE CONVERT. 

giveth understanding/' Spiritus in horainihiis et in- 
spiratio Omnipotentis dat intelligentiam^ I concluded 
the human race is inspired. God gives understand- 
ing not only in the sense that he creates the faculty^ 
but also in the sense that he is its object. In being 
the object of the intellect he is also that of the will, 
and affirms himself both as the True and the Good, 
as alike the object of knowledge and of love. Hence 
it is we understand and love, know and aspire. This 
affirming himself as the True and the Good in natu- 
ral reason is natural inspiration, and the cause of the 
universal aspiration of the race to God as the Infi- 
nitely True and the Supremely Good. In this in- 
spiration and this aspiration of the race I detect the 
dignity and authority of the race. In it I find the 
worth and legitimacy of reason, and vindicate my 
right to take the reason of the race as a legitimate 
ground of belief. The reason of the race may be 
safely followed, because it is the inspiration of the 
Almighty, who can neither deceive nor be deceived. 
The race has always recognized, in some form, super- 
natural communion with God, and held that it is 
only by virtue of this supernatural communion, that 



PROVIDENTIAL MEN. 316 

is, a comm"union in a higher sense than that by 
which we are rendered capable of knowing and loving 
in the natural order, that the race is elevated and 
set forward in its career of progress. Then to believe 
in the reality of this communion, in the fact of this 
supernatural aid or assistance, is not an irrational 
belief, or a belief on an inadequate authority. The 
race has always believed that men are elevated and 
set forward by supernatural assistance, obtained 
through the agency of specially inspired individuals, 
or what I call Providential men. 'sJWherever you find 
man, you find him with some sort of religion, and all 
rehgions, the lowest and most corrupt, as well as the 
highest and purest, recognize a supernatural element 
in human life, and claim, each for itself, the assent 
of mankind, on the ground of beiDg the channel or 
medium through which it is attained, or flows into 
the natural, and supernaturalizes human action/ 
This is the essential, the vital principle of all the 
religions which are or ever have been. Take this 
away, and you leave nothing to which the common 
sense of mankind does or can give the name of re- 
ligion, y As this supernatural element may flow in / 



316 THE CONVERT. 

without violence or injury to the natural^ what rea- 
son have you to assert that this common belief of 
mankind is false or unreasonable ? For you who 
concede no authoritative religion, propounded and 
interpreted by an authoritative church, what higher 
authority is or can there be for believing any thing 
than the reason of the race ? It is your highest rea- 
son after the immediate and express word of Grod, 
and not to believe it without a higher reason for dis- 
crediting it, is not to follow reason, but to reject 
reason. 

My conduct, then, was not unreasonable, but 
reasonable ; and the joy I felt at finding myself be- 
lieving in the supernatural providence of God, was 
no silly joy, but such as I might well indulge, for 
it proceeded from the recognition by the soul, though 
as yet but partially and dimly, of the object to which 
I had always aspired. I had made the greatest 
step I had yet made, in this recognition of the fact 
that the human race is advanced by the aid of Prov- 
idential men. In it I seemed to assert my own free- 
dom, and what is more, the freedom of God. No 
matter how I had reasoned or talked, I had regarded 



PKOVIDENTIAL MEN. 3l7 

God as a Fatum^ or an Invincible Necessity, creating 
from the necessity of his own being, and hedged in 
and bound by the invariable and inflexible laws of 
nature. This is more generally the case with our 
modern philosophers, and so-called free thinkers, 
than is commonly supposed. The real obstacle in 
many minds to the acceptance of Christian faith, is 
the want of belief in the freedom of God. Read the 
works of all your non-Catholic philosophers, and you 
will find that they nowhere admit Providence, or the 
free intervention of God in the affairs of the Uni- 
verse he has himself created. What they call the 
providential is always the fixed, the invariable, the 
inexorable, the fatal. They reject miracles, the su- 
pernatural, or voluntary interpositions on the part of 
the Creator, because they are assumed to be marks 
of change, of variability, and forbidden by the laws 
of nature. I had, in asserting Providential men, 
risen above this difficulty, and become able to under- 
stand that while God binds nature, nature cannot 
bind him ; that being in himself sufficient for him- 
self, no necessity compels him to operate externally, 
or to create a world ; and therefore creation itself 



318 THE CONVERT. 

must be, on his part, a free, voluntary act, and much 
more so his intervention in the government of what 
he has created. This threw a heavy burden from 
my shoulders, and in freeing God from his assumed 
bondage to nature, unshackled my own limbs, and 
made me feel that in God's freedom I had a sure 
pledge of my own. God could, if he chose, be gra- 
cious to me ; he could hear my prayers, respond to 
my entreaties, interpose to protect me, to assist me, 
to teach me, and to bless me. He was free to love 
me as his child, and to do me all the good his infi- 
nite love should prompt. I was no longer chained, 
like Prometheus, to the Caucasian rock, with my 
vulture passions devouring my heart ; I was no longer 
fatherless, an orphan left to the tender mercies of 
inexorable general laws, and my heart bounded with 
joy, and I leaped to embrace the neck of my Father, 
and to rest my head on his bosom. I shall never 
forget the ecstasy of that moment, when I first re- 
alized to myself that God is free. 



CHAPTEE XVI. 

STKUGGLES AFTER LIGHT. 

I HAD now settled it in my own mind^ that the 
progress of man and society is effected only by su- 
pernatural assistance^ and that this assistance is ren- 
dered by Almighty God^ in perfect accordance with 
nature and reason^ through Providential men. M. 
Cousin had emitted the theory, that the great man is 
great because he, better than any of his contempora- 
ries, collects and represents, or impersonates, the ideas 
and sentiments of his own age ; but I adopted the 
opposite doctrine, that the truly great man is great 
because he makes his age, determines the ideas and 
sentiments of the race, and by his own elevation 
lifts them to a higher plane. Truly great men are 
superior to their age, and give it what it has not, 
and cannot draw from its own funds. 



320 THE CONVERT. 

I placed, as yet, our Lord in the category of 
great men, Providential men, along with Abraham, 
Moses, Zoroaster, Confucius, Socrates, Plato, &c., but 
I considered him greater than any of them, and, in- 
deed, as completing the line of Providential men, 
and supplying all that was wanting in those who 
went before him. I ventured even to call him God- 
man in a special sense, and thought, for a moment, 
that, by my doctrine of Communion, by virtue of 
which the object becomes identical with the subject 
in the fact of life, I could explain the chief mys- 
tery of the Incarnation, and indeed, all the princi- 
pal Christian dogmas, and find a common ground on 
which Trinitarians and Unitarians, Orthodox and 
Heterodox, Conservatives and Eeformers, the believ- 
ers in revelation and the advocates of natural reason, 
could all meet in peace and love, and unite as one 
man to effect the amelioration and progress of so- 
ciety. It was a brave dream, but only a dream, from 
which I soon awoke. 

I made at the time a distinction between being 
and life, and held, after Leroux, that being actual- 
izes itself in life or living. I fell here into the fun- 



STRUGGLES AFTER LIGHT. 321 

damental error of all or nearly all modern, and no 
little of ancient philosophy. The starting point of 
Leroux's doctrine, and which I accepted from him, 
that thought is a phenomenon that includes simul- 
taneously subject, object, and their relation, consist- 
ently carried out, implies realism as opposed to 
idealism. It implies that we know the object, be- 
cause we think it, and we think it simply because it 
is, and is immediately present to our intellect. I 
saw and understood this well enough ; but in apply- 
ing it to being, to ontology, I forgot it, as Leroux 
himself did. The primitive objective element of 
thought is indeed being, I said, real being too, but 
not actual being. Keal being and actual being 
identified give us then, 1, Pure Being — das reine 
Seyn^ of Hegel, which is simply possible being; 2, Idea, 
or possible being advanced to the state of type, or 
mental conception ; and 3, Life, das Wesen^ orbei^ig :*^ 
actualized, being advanced from the state of possi- 
bility to living being, or complete actuality. These 
three moments, states, or terms, I had the simplicity 
to regard as the real significance of the Christian 
Trinity. Truth is always simpler than error, and re- 



322 THE CONVERT. 

quires far less eifort to explain or uiiderstaiid it. 
This possible, or, as Lei oux said, virtual being, wbicli 
precedes both Idea and Life, Leroux identified with 
the Void of the Budhists, and represented as stand- 
ing opposed to the Plenum or Pleroma of the Gnos- 
tics. It was, then, in reality only possible, not actual ; 
but it appears not to have occurred to him any more 
than it did to me, that the possible without the 
actual is a mere abstraction, and like all abstrac- 
tions a nullity. Suppose all actual being wanting, 
and you can conceive of nothing as possible. Sup- 
pose no living, actual God^ and the possibility of 
God ceases to be supposable. Hence, Aristotle and 
all theologians call God actus purissimus^ most 
pure act, and deny that in him in reference to his 
being or perfections there is any possihilityj or any 
thing in potential not yet actual, but susceptible of 
becoming actual. He is eternal, and eternally most 
full and perfect being. He is so, or he is not at all. 
The possible may be considered either in relation 
to God or in relation to the creature. In relation to 
God, it is simply his power to create creatures not 
actually created ; and in relation to creature, it is 



STRUGGLES AFTER LIGHT. 323 

the creature's power as second cause to do what it 
has not yet done. Creatures which God may create, 
but does not, may "be said to exist virtually in him, 
as ideas in his own mind, but, as so existing, they 
are not distinguishable from his Divine being or 
essence itself. So the things we may do but have 
not yet done are the virtuality of our nature, and 
indistinguishable from it. Abstracted from God, 
the creatures he may create or the ideas he may 
clothe with existence, are simple nullities, and in- 
conceivable ; and so, when abstracted from our 
power, are the things we may as second causes do, 
but as yet have not done. It is the actuality of 
God that renders creation possible, and it is only in 
the intuition of that actuality, that possible crea- 
tures or perfections are conceivable, jll^is also in 
the fact of our actuality that we are m can be con- 
ceived capable of acting, doing, or producing. 

As plain and as conclusive as all this is, very few 
philosophers ever apprehend it ; or if they appre- 
hend it, they apprehend it only as a barren fact, 
and see no use to be made of it. The great Leibnitz, 
in commenting on St. Anselm's argument for the 



324 THE CONVERT. 

existence of God from tlie idea present to our minds 
of tlie most perfect being, says, it would be conclu- 
sive if it were previously established that the real 
existence of most perfect being, or God, is possible ! 
Storchenou, a disciple of Wolf, as Wolf was a disci- 
ple of Leibnitz, and whose work has been, and I 
believe still is, used as a text-book of philosophy 
even in some Catholic Colleges, seems to hold that 
possible being is anterior to real being, and to precede 
the actual, living God, by a superior possible God, 
just as if the actual, living God is not the reason, 
ground, and condition of all possibility. If God 
were not, nothing would be possible, not even his 
own existence. There is nothing real or possible 
anterior to God or independent of him. It is he 
himself in the infinite fulness of his own being that 
makes creation possible, as it is his own creative act 
that renders it actual ; and that abstract being 
which we call the nature of things is concrete in 
him, and is his own eternal, universal, immutable, 
and indestructible essence. 

The source of the error of placing the possible 
before the actual, and presenting it as infinite virtu- 



STRUGGLES AFTER LIGHT. 325 

ality actualizing itself in the universe, and rising, as 
Hegel, and after him Cousin, says, to self conscioiis- 
ness in the consciousness of man, or in our conscious- 
ness of our own existence, is in the assumption that it 
is the subject, not the object, that determines the 
form of the thought. Cousin and Leroux both say, 
and say truly, that thought is a phenomenon embrac- 
ing simultaneously and indissolubly three elements, 
subject, object, and their relation. They say truly, 
too, that the relation is the form of the thought. But 
they both maintain that the subject determines the 
form, and thus with Kant make the categories forms 
of the human understanding, and assume that we 
think things so and so, not because they are so, but 
because such is the nature or character of our intel- 
lect. They hold object is actualized in our thought, 
and is only a virtuahty when we do not think it. As 
we never see ourselves in ourselves, and recognize our 
own existence only as mirrored in the act of thinking, 
we exist for ourselves only so far as we enter into 
and manifest ourselves in the act. As prior to the 
act of thinking, neither subject nor object actually 



326 THE CONVERT. 

exists for us, either^ independent of our thought, is 
only a virtuality, not an actuality. Thought there- 
fore is their actualization, and this actualization of 
subject and object in thought, pensee^ is what Leroux 
meant by life, as distinguished from being. Now, as 
the form of this life is determined by the subject, 
we are forced in applying it to God, to deny that he 
is actual or living God prior to his being thought, 
and to regard him as actual or living God only in so 
far as concreted in our life. Hence the modern Pan- 
theism, which represents God as realizing or actual- 
izing himself in idea, idea as realizing itself in the 
race, the race as realizing itself in individuals, and in- 
dividuals as realizing themselves in the act of think- 
ing, that is, feeling, knowing, and loving ; a superb 
system of transcendental nulhsm. The mother error 
is in supposing that the subject determines the form 
of the thought, and therefore is the condition of the 
actualization of the object, as well as of itself This 
supposes that both when unthought are virtualities, 
not actualities. But there is no thought save by 
the concurrence of both subject and object. In 
the generation of thought, both subject and object 



STRUGGLES AFTER LIGHT. 327 

must act. What is not actual cannot act^ and 
therefore both subject and object must be actualities 
prior to thought^ and therefore when unthought. 
The subject in thought is not alone active^ or active 
at all save in concurrence with the activity of the ob- 
ject. The object depends on Jhe subject to be 
thought if you will, but not to be, or to be actual, 
for it can be thought only on condition that it exists 
prior to the thought, and its action precedes the ac- 
tion of the subject. 

The common error of philosophers is in suppos- 
ing that it is the subject that affirms the object, 
wliile it is the object that affirms or evidences itself 
to the subject. This is the condemnation of our 
psychologists, or those who seek the principle of philo- 
sophy, or primum philosopliicumj in the fact of con- 
sciousness, or an affection of the soul, or subject ; 
and the reason why all sound philosophy is and 
must be ontological, taking its principle in the fact 
that the object is, and affirms itself in the fact of 
consciousness along with the subject, and as the 
condition of its activity. In all human life, *the 
action of the object precedes and renders possible 



328 THE CONVERT. 

the action of the subject. A thing does not exist 
because we think it, but we think it because it is 
intelligibly — actively — present to our intelligence, or 
intellectual faculty. It is, then, not the intelligence 
that determines the intelligibility of the object, but 
the intelligibility 4)f the object that determines the 
intelligence ; and therefore the object, not the sub- 
ject, that determines the form of the thought. 
Things evidence themselves to us, and we see them 
because they are, and as they are a parte reij for if it 
were not so, we could see what is not, or what does 
not exist, which would be absurd. What is not, or 
exists not, is not intelligible. 

All this was implied in the doctrine that thought 
is invariably and indissolubly a synthesis of object, 
subject, and their relation, though I did not at the 
time clearly perceive ik Had I done so, I should 
have perceived that the distinction made between 
being and life, and the doctrine that both subject and 
object are actualized in thought, are inadmissible. 
The object flows in its action into the hfe of the sub- 
ject, but not the subject into the object. Both are 
actual prior to the generation of the thought. But 



STRUGGLES AFTER LIGHT. 329 

overlooking this fact, I proceeded on the erroneous as- 
sumption, that being, whether of the object or the sub- 
ject, when unthought, is latent, virtual, not actual, 
and is actualized in thought, and therefore that in 
the thought, both subject and object are identical. 
This actualization of subject and object in the act of 
thinking, is what I called life as distinguished from 
being. This life I called the life of the subject, 
because its form is determined by the subject, and 
hence I maintained that both subject and object live 
and are one in our life. 

\/ Applying this doctrine to our Lord, and seeking 
to explain by it the mystery of the Incarnation, or to 
get at the fact covered or intended by that mystery, 
I took the Incarnation as a fact of life, not of nature. 
The Christian world calls our Lord God-man. This 
is true, if you speak of him in his actuality, in his 
life, not in his nature. Suppose the man Christ 
Jesus, — for man he was according to the most orthodox 
teaching, — was taken up, miraculously, if you will, 
into a supernatural communion with God, so that 
God, as in the case of every Providential man, became 
his object in a supernatural sense ; then, since life 



330 THE CONVERT. 

partakes alike of subject and object, and is the 
union or identification of the two, his life must be 
strictly a Divine-human life, and he in the life he 
lives truly God-man, as the Christian world has 
always believed. Is not here the Incarnation, the ac- 
tualization of the Divine in the human ? And as it 
is evidently a miraculous communion of the human 
with the Divine, is not this the Miraculous Concep- 
tion and Birth of our Lord ? 

But you have only the Divine-human life, not 
the hypostatic union of the two natures in one per- 
son. Yet I have two natures united, identified in one 
life, and as these natures live only by virtue of their 
intercommunion, I have the union of both the living 
God and living man in one life. It is the Ufe that 
redeems and saves. Whatever emphasis maybe laid 
on the death of Christ, it is evident from the Scrip- 
tures that his death is referred to only as the com- 
pletion and crown of his life. He came into the 
world that we might have life, to beget in us life, a 
new, a higher, a diviner life. That he redeems the 
world by infusing life into our life through communion 
with himself, is the belief of Christendom. As the 



STRUGGLES AFTER LIGHT. 331 

Father hath life in himself, and as the Son lives by 
the Father, so his disciples live by him. It is the life 
that saves, and what else is the real significance of 
salvation through an Incarnate Saviour, or the 
union in our Lord of this twofold redeeming and 
saving life ? 

As the Father hath life in himself, so hath he 
given to the Son to have life in himself The Son 
by his supernatural or miraculous communion with 
the Father, lives a Divine-human life ; so the Apos- 
tles and Disciples, by communion with the Son, lived 
the same life, and through him became one in life 
with the Father and with one another, and were ele- 
vated above their natural life, and set forward in the 
career of progress. Here I said, is the Christian 
doctrine of Holy Communion, or Eucharista. The 
whole mystery of the Christian religion has been sup- 
posed to turn around the mystery of Holy Com- 
munion, and in this communion the Scriptures teach^ 
and the Church has always held, that the communi- 
cant really receives the flesh and blood of our Lord. 
'' Except ye eat my flesh, and drink my blood, ye 
have no Hfe in you/' The flesh profiteth nothing, 



332 THE CONVERT. 

and the Church never teaches that we must eat the 
flesh or drink the blood of Christ in a gross, carnal 
sense, as we eat meat bought in the shambles. 
What is meant is, that we really receive and have 
incorporated into our life, the Divine-human life of 
our Lord. This is done by communion with him, 
and through him with God the Father. Thus he 
becomes to us through communion, the mediator or 
medium between God and men, as St. Paul calls him. 
Thus from the central point of communion I can 
explain the Incarnation, the Mediatorial life of Christ, 
and the principal Christian dogmas, as I attempted 
to show in a Letter on the Mediatorial Life of Christy 
addressed to Dr. Channing, which I wrote and pub- 
lished in the summer of 1843. 

But we who live at this day do not communi- 
cate directly with Christ our Lord. We do it, and 
can do it, only through the medium of others. The 
Apostles and Disciples lived in personal intercourse 
with him, and therefore communed with him directly 
and immediately as their object. By this direct and 
immediate communion, his Divine-human life be- 
came infused into their life. Others by communion 



STRUGGLES AFTER LIGHT. 333 

with them partake of the same life. The succeeding 
generation participates in it by communing with its 
predecessor. Thus by communion the life may be 
infused through all men living contemporaneously, 
and transmitted to the latest posterity. The Apos- 
tles become thus the medium of its reception, diffu- 
sion, and transmission. Here is the meaning of Apos- 
tolic Succession. 

This Divine-human life is one and identical in all 
who receive it, for it is a real life, really lived, not 
merely desired by the heart or assented to as a doctrine 
by the reason. It enters really into the life of indi- 
viduals as the life of their Hfe. All life is organic, and 
consequently all who live this life are moulded or 
formed into one body, living one and the same life, 
the life of Christ, and therefore rightly termed his 
body, the Church, as the Scriptures expressly teach. 
Hence I have the Church, not as an association, an 
organization, or mere aggregation of individuals, but 
as an organism, one and Catholic, — one because its 
life is one, and Catholic because it includes all who 
live the life, of whatever age or nation, and because 
all men in every age and nation may by communion 



334 THE CONVERT. 

live it. The life of Christ is not only life, but the 
principle of life, and operating in the body assimilates 
individuals, as the human body assimilates the par- 
ticles of the food eaten. It is then no sham, no 
illusion, but the real body of Christ, a real living 
organism, and in some sense a continuation of the 
Incarnation. 

But as the Church includes all who are assimilated 
by its central life, and as it is only the real recep- 
tion of that life that elevates and advances one, it is 
clear that out of the Church no one can be saved. 
There is no other name given under heaven [the 
name of Jesus] among men whereby we can be saved, 
and as he saves us only by communicating his Divine- 
human life, according to the universal law of life, the 
doctrine of exclusive salvation is and must be strictly 
true. 

But as the life of the Church is a higher than 
natural life, higher than the life of the race, since it 
is a Divine-human life in a supernatural sense, it is 
and must be authoritative, not only for my individual 
reason, but also for the human race itself. It is the 
highest manifestation of both the Divine and the 



STRUGGLES AFTER LIGHT. 335 

human, and therefore is in both Divine and human 
things, the highest authority under God, nay, is the 
authority of God himself. Hence the authority of 
the Church, and the reasonableness and obligation 
of individuals and of all men to submit to her, — to 
believe what she teaches and to do what she com- 
mands. I found here the authority I had been so 
long seeking for ; a real, legitimate, not a sham or a 
usurped authority, to which reason could submit 
without abnegating itself, or ceasing to be reason. 

Moreover, the Divine-human life which creates or 
constitutes the Church, and is its authority, the au- 
thority of the indwelling Holy Ghost, — for I identi- 
fied the interior life of the Church with the Para- 
clete, — is transmitted in the Church from the Apos- 
tles, and has been operative at every moment of 
time from the Incarnation to the present. The life of 
the Church now is identically the life of the Church in 
the first age, by virtue of an uninterrupted commu- 
nion with the Apostles. Each successive generation 
communes with its predecessor, and derives its life 
from it. This is the principle of the tradition, or 
transmission of life, called under one aspect the Apos- 



336 THE CONVERT. 

tolic Succession^ and under another Apostolic Tradi- 
tion. As Apostolic or Ecclesiastical tradition is the 
tradition of the Divine-human life, it is always au- 
thoritative with all the authority of that life itself. 
Hence the authority of Tradition, as opposed to the 
Protestant principle of private judgment. The error 
of Protestantism was in that it broke with Tradition, 
broke with the past, and cut itself off from the body 
of Christ, and therefore from the channel through 
which the Christian life is communicated. Protes- 
tantism was a schism, a separation from the source 
and current of the Divine-human hfe which redeems 
and saves the world, and Protestants are therefore 
thrown back upon nature, and able to live only the 
natural life of the race, — saving the portion of Chris- 
tian life they brought away with them at t;he time 
of the separation, and which, as not renewed from its 
source, must in time be exhausted. 

In the same way I explained all the Christian 
dogmas I was acquainted with, and found that, do 
what I would, I must admit that the great current 
of Christian life had flowed and still flowed down 
through the Catholic Church. It is evident to every 



STKUGGLES AFTER LIGHT. 3S7 

Catholic reader that this theory, elaborated with skill, 
indeed, and not without some speciousness, is far 
enough from being an adequate expression of Catho- 
licity. But as far as it went it was not false or un- 
worthy of consideration. It indeed demonstrated or 
proved no peculiar or distinctive Catholic doctrine, 
and was far enough from being a complete theory, or 
adequate to its own demands ; but it was in the 
main true philosophy, and enabled me to grasp cer- 
tain laws of life which Christianity accepts, and in 
accordance with which it acts. It removed, and re- 
moved philosophically, all my objections to the more 
obscure or the more offensive dogmas of the Catholic 
Church, and showed me how she could operate, in ac- 
cordance with nature, the elevation of nature, and 
blend the Divine redeeming and saving life in with 
the human, and make them in the Christian one life. 
It did not give me the Catholic dogmas, nor even the 
Catholic Church in her deeper significance, but it did 
prepare me, by the grace of God, to receive them. 
My philosophy had answered all my objections to the 
Catholic system, if I may so speak, and had supplied 
me with all the principles which that system pre^ 
15 



338 THE CONVERT. 

supposes^ and which prove that it harmonizes with 
the dictates of reason and the demands of nature. 
There is in the Christian Church and in Christian 
communion infinitely more than in my doctrine of 
life and communion ; but there is nothing opposed to 
that doctrine, or which makes it necessary for a Cath- 
olic to exclude it. The law of life I asserted is a 
real, a genuine, and a universal law ; the communion 
I asserted is a real and genuine communion, and is 
included even in the doctrine of Christian communion ; 
but in Christian communion there is an immediate 
communion with Christ, an increase of life from the 
Incarnate Grod, the very source and fountain of all 
Christian life, not merely a communion with him as 
he enters into the life of others. Yet there is a com- 
munion with him in the way I supposed, a transmis- 
sion of his life, and the Church, in the sense I have ex- 
plained, is a reality, and Church Authority, Tradition, 
Apostolic Succession, &c., as I alleged, are real and 
true. These are all included in Catholic theology, 
though they do not, as I supposed, constitute it. 

In making this application of the doctrine of Life, 
as I did, my mind v»^as intent mainly on one point, 



STRUGGLES AFTER LIGHT. 339 

that of the real infusion of a Divine element into 
human life, by which that life should be supernatu- 
rally elevated, and rendered progressive. I saw that 
the law of life explained the possibility and practi- 
cability of this ; but I did not perceive in the 
application of it, how far I departed from the doc- 
trine, that both subject and object when unthought 
are merely latent or virtual, not actual, because in 
reality, though I accepted that doctrine from Leroux, 
as found in connection with the truth he helped me 
to grasp, it never had any hold on my mind, and 
never received any attention from me. Back of it in 
my mind was the true doctrine, that the object, 
though it may create or actualize the subject, is it- 
self actual antecedently to human thought, as is evi- 
dent from the fact that I held to Providence, and as- 
serted the free intervention of Grod in human affairs, 
that the Father has life in himself, and therefore 
lives independently of the subject, and that he per- 
forms the miracle of raising the Man Christ Jesus 
into a supernatural communion with himself It is 
evident that, however I might have spoken when 
treating the ontological question, I was not a Pan- 



340 THE CONVERT. 

theist^ that I held that God is free and independent, 
and confined the law of life I set forth to created 
existence. Leroux erred by making the law univer- 
sal, and by regarding all being not developing itself 
in human thought, as not actual. These errors I 
never embraced except in mere words ; they never 
really entered into my thought, and I held from the 
first, that the law was applicable only to created or 
dependent existence, and that the subject and object 
are actual powers and therefore act, not that they 
are rendered actual by acting. Undoubtedly tha in- 
tellect can be actual only in acting; but it is inherent- 
ly active by virtue of the immediate and permanent 
intuition and creative presence of the Intelligible, 
which is God ; but it is actual power to know, before 
knowing this or that particular object as after, and 
therefore is not actualized in any degree by knowing. 
Making these reserves, the doctrine of life or com- 
munion is true, and, taken in connection with the 
history or traditions of the race, does all that I al- 
leged. I was not thus far deceived. It gave me the 
Church in the sense I asserted. My only error was 
in supposing that the Church and her doctrines were 



STRUGGLES AFTER LIGHT. 341 

only what I explained tliem to be. The Christian 
mysteries lay infinitely deeper than I supposed. But 
the real advantage to me of the doctrine was not in 
its erroneous explanation of the ontological origin of 
the Divine-human life, but in its enabling me to 
perceive a law of life, in accordance with which it 
could be infused into us, and supernaturalize our life, 
by giving to our actions a supernatural principle, as 
well as a supernatural end. This service it rendered 
me, and this service it may render to all who com- 
prehend it, and hence it is, in my judgment, a true 
and useful preparation for the reception of the 
Gospel. 



CHAPTEE XVII. 

A STEP FORWARD. 

It may weU be believed tbat I did not arrive at tbese 
conclusions immediately and at a single bound. The 
transition from one order of tbought to another is 
seldom effected at once. Man is a bundle of habits 
and prejudices, as weU as a being endowed with rea- 
son. His progress from one system to another is 
usually gradual, and remains for a long time incom- 
plete. A ray of light has flashed on his mind, but he 
does not at once take note of all the objects it illu- 
mines. I saw, at first, very httle in Leroux to my 
purpose, and it was only some time after I had read 
him that I saw the bearing of his doctrine of life or 
communion, as I modified it, on theological ques- 
tions. My mind was forced to take the direction 
which it did, and to make the apphcation of it I have 



A STEP FORWARD. 343 

briefly sketched, by a couple of Lectures by Theo- 
dore Parker, to which I listened in the Autumn of 
1841. The Lectures were the first part of the vol- 
ume, which Mr. Parker subsequently published, en- 
titled, A Discourse of Hatters pertaining to Religion^ 
and contained nothing except a learned and eloquent 
statement of the doctrine which I had long defended, 
and which I have called the Religion of Humanity. 
But strange as it may seem, the moment I heard 
that doctrine from his lips, I felt an invincible repug- 
nance to it, and saw, or thought I saw at a glance, 
that it was unphilosophical and anti-religious. 

Mr. Parker at that time was one of my highly 
prized personal friends, a young man, full of life and 
promise. . There was no young man of my acquaint- 
ance for whom I had a hioi-her reo-ard, or from whom 
I hoped so much. He had very respectable intel- 
lectual ability, was learned, witty, and eloquent. 
His ideas were perhaps a little crude, and his taste 
needed a little chastening, but his fancy was lively, 
his imagination brilliant, and his rhetorical powers 
were of the first order. He had devoured an im- 
mense number of all sorts of books, and could dis- 



344 THE CONVERT. 

course not badly on almost any subject. He was 
more brilliant than solid^ less erudite than lie ap- 
peared or was thought to be, and in translating a 
work from the German of De Wette, made some 
sad blunders ; but he was still young, and his attain- 
ments were unquestionably above the average stand- 
ard of American scholarship. His powers of sarcasm 
and declamation were, however, superior to his pow- 
ers as a reasoner, and his attachment to his own 
opinions was stronger than his love of truth. His 
greatest defect was lack of inherent loyalty. He 
would, perhaps, walk boldly to the dungeon, the 
scaffold, or the stake in defence of the cause he had 
espoused, or an opinion he had once emitted, but he 
closed resolutely his mind, his heart, and his eyes, to 
the reception of any light which might require him 
to revise and modify views to which he had once com- 
mitted himself. He might be a fanatic, and die in 
defence of his opinions, but never a martyr to the 
truth, even in case it and his opinions should happen 
to coincide. He had the pride of the Stoic, but not 
the humility of the Christian. His boldness, firm- 
ness, courage, and independence, were striking, and 



A STEP FORWARD. 345 

would have deserved very high reverence, if they had 
been exhibited in the cause of truth, not simply in 
the cause of Mr. Theodore Parker. Nevertheless, he 
has not belied his early promise, and is undeniably 
one of the most distinguished Protestant ministers in 
the United States. 

As soon as I listened to his Lectures, I perceived 
that, though we apparently held the same doctrines, 
there was and had been a radical difference between 
us. We had both, it is true, placed the origin and 
ground of religion in a religious sentiment natural to 
man ; but while I made that sentiment the point of 
departure for proving that religion is in accordance 
with nature and reason, and therefore of removing 
what had been my chief difficulty in the way of ac- 
cepting supernatural revelation, he made it his start- 
ing-point for reducing all religion to mere naturalism, 
or as Carlyle calls it, ^' natural-supernaturalism,^' 
another name for downright Pantheism, or rather. 
Atheism. He held and applied it nakedly, in an un- 
believing spirit ; I held it in connection with many 
elements of my early traditional faith, and applied it 

in a beUeving spirit. When encountering the doc- 
15- 



346 THE CONVERT. 

trine he was in the access of his wrath against reli- 
gion^ or as he said^ ^'^ popular theology/' produced by 
the reaction of his reason against Calvinism, in 
which he had been born and reared, and of his heart 
against the inefficiency and hollowness of the sleek 
and decorous morality which formed the burden of 
fashionable Unitarian preaching ; and he seized 
upon it as an instrument for demolishing the Chris- 
tian temple, overthrowing the altar of Christ, and 
of sweeping away the Bible, and all creeds, dogmas, 
forms, rites, and institutions of religion. He was mad 
at religion, and as the Sartor Resartus would say, he 
wished to turn men in utter nakedness out into this 
bleak and wintry world, to rely on themselves alone, 
and to support themselves as best they might from 
their own native resources. But I had long since got 
through tha^t stage in my disease, had long since 
subdued my wrath, and now longed to approach 
nearer and nearer to the Christian world, not to re- 
move farther and farther from it. I had learned to 
loath doubt, to have a horror of unbelief, eTnd was 
ready to be an orthodox believer the moment that I 



A STEP FORWARD. 347 

could see my way to believe without violence to my 
human nature, or the abnegation of my reason. 

I have already said it was not arguments for be- 
lief I wanted, but the removal of the obstacles I en- 
countered, or imagined I encountered, in the way of 
believing. Just in proportion as these were removed 
Christian belief seemed to rise spontaneously in my 
heart and soul. The doctrine of the origin of reli- 
gion in a religious sentiment natural to man, which in 
my mind had really meant no more than that reli- 
gion is adapted to man's nature and meets an inherent 
want of his soul, had removed the most formidable 
of these obstacles, and placed me with my face 
towards Christianity. It had never been in my 
mind, in fact, either the origin or the ground of reli- 
gion, but simply an answer to my principal objection 
to religion, and therefore I could and did include in 
religion more than I did or could deduce from it by a 
logical process. Mr. Parker, on the contrary, really 
made it the origin and ground of religion, the source 
and basis of all that he included in that term, and 
therefore with him it led legitimately and necessarily 
to sheer naturalism. He made it the basis of his 



348 THE CONVERT. 

theology, and therefore his theology becarae simply 
anthropology ; I made it the basis of solving an ob- 
jection to Eevelation, and therefore remained free to 
accept Christian theology. Each applied it accord- 
ing to his wants and tendencies of the moment. 

But these distinctions I had not expUcitly made 
before listening to Mr. Parker ; yet, as soon as I 
looked at the doctrine in its nakedness, as he presented 
it, I saw that it could not support the superstruc- 
ture which I had in my own mind erected ; that, 
though it embodied a fact, an important fact, it could 
offer no foundation for real objective religious belief. 
So far as I had really built on it, my system was worth 
nothing, and was and could be only a vain effort to 
devise a religion without God, ending at best in mere 
soul worship, or the worship of my own internal sen- 
timents and affections projected. From the internal 
sentiment alone it is impossible to conclude the exist- 
ence of any external object, for the sentiment, 
taken as sentiment, is only an affection or modifica- 
tion of the subject, and indistinguishable, substan- 
tially, from the subject itself. Philosophy has never 
yet discovered a passage from the subjective to the 



A STEP FORWARD. 349 

objective. Both must be given simultaneously, in 
one and the same intuition, or neither can be as- 
serted. To make religion solely dependent on a sen- 
timent natural to man, is to make it purely subjec- 
tive, purely human, a development of human nature, 
and therefore to suppose a religion which presents no 
real object of worship, which implies no God, no ob- 
ligation, or sense of duty. This would be absurd, 
for religion, if religion there be, necessarily implies 
behef in God and the recognition of our obligation 
to worship him. In it is embraced^ as essential to 
its very existence, the idea of intercommunion be- 
tween God and man, of object and subject, and it is 
denied the moment that you reduce it to the subject 
alone, or to the object alone ; or, what is the same 
thing, identify as one in substance, God and man, ob- 
ject and subject. Never was language more grossly 
perverted than by Cousin, when he called the Panthe- 
ist, Spinoza, rehgious, and made his errors flow from 
an excess of piety. The Pantheism of Spinoza is 
as far removed from religion as the Subjectivism of 
Kant, the Egoism of Fichte, or the Atheism of 
D'Holbach. Unless you can assert the two terms, 



350 THE CONVERT. 

God and man^ as substantially distinct, or as two 
distinct substances^ bearing to each other the rela- 
tion of Creator and creature, Sovereign and subject, 
you cannot assert religion in any sense at all. 
\ Mr. Parker, I saw, was right in his application of 
the doctrine, that religion originates in a sentiment 
natural to man, and that I must either go with him, 
and reject all religion deserving the name, or seek 
the ground of religion elsewhere. This induced me 
to reexamine what it was that I had really, thus far, 
made the basis of such religious belief as I had. In 
doing this, the vast importance and reach of the doc- 
trine of Leroux, in regard to thought or life as the 
joint product of the intercommunion of subject and 
object, when applied to religion, began to dawn on 
my mind, and I made the applications of that doc- 
trine which I have already set forth. I founds too, 
that I had never really built so exclusively on the 
doctrine of Benjamin Constant as in my mental con- 
fusion I had supposed, and that I had really ap- 
proached in principle nearer to the Christian world 
than I had myself imagined. While admitting still 
the relio-ious sentiment as in some sense natural to 



i 



A STEP FORWARD. 351 

man, and therefore proving that man may be reli- 
gious without violence to his nature^ indeed, in 
harmony with it, I now explicitly rejected that 
sentiment as the origin and ground of religion, and 
denied that religion is simply the result of its devel- 
opment. I placed the origin and ground of religion 
in the relation of Creator and creature, of God and 
man, made known to man by God himself, and held 
it to be the infusion, through communion, of a su- 
pernatural life into natural human life. In this 
sense I reviewed Mr. Parker's Lectures, when pub- 
lished in a volume. In reviewing the volume and 
refuting its pantheism, naturalism, or infidelity, I 
found myself advancing step by step towards real 
Christian belief, I was impressed, as I never had 
been before, with the utter insufficiency, the noth- 
ingness, of the system to which I had been more or 
less attached for nearly twenty years, and which, I 
must say, had never satisfied my reason. I caught 
glimpses of Christian truths which were to me both 
new and cheering, and I saw, though dimly as yet, 
that the deeper philosophy was with the orthodox, 
not with the heterodox. I began to discover that 



352 THE CONVERT. 

the doctrine of the Church in the Catholic sense 
was far profounder and truer than the doctrine of 
No-Church asserted by Dr. Channing and my Uni- 
tarian friends. I obtained the main conceptions of 
the Churchy and of her principal dogmas^ which I 
have set forth in the foregoing chapter^ and went so 
far as to assert the problem of our age is^ '^ Catho- 
licity without the Papacy.'' 

This problem I thought I could solve by my doc- 
trine of life. My first step was to proclaim that doc- 
trine^ and the Catholicity it had led me to adopt. 
The great thing was to revive Church principles^, to 
induce people to regard the Church as an organism^ 
and to effect^ if possible, the reunion of Christen- 
dom, now broken into fragments, not on a new 
Church basis, but really on what had been the basis 
of the Church from the beginning. Filled with this 
thought, I consented to become one of the Editors 
of The Christia7i World, a new weekly journal, pub- 
lished by a brother of the late Dr. William EUery 
Channing, and which I trusted to be able to make 
the organ of my views. I commenced in that jour- 
nal a series of essays on The Mission of Jesus, which 



A STEP FORWARD. 353 

attracted no little attention. The design of these 
essays was to develop and apply to the explanation 
of Christianity my doctrine of life or communion. I 
did not in the outset see very clearly where I should 
land; but I hoped to do something to draw attention 
to the Church as a living organism, and the medium 
through which the Son of God practically redeems, 
saves, or blesses mankind. The first and second 
essays pleased my Unitarian friends, the third drew 
forth a warm approbation from a Puritan journal, the 
fourth threw the Tractarians into ecstasies, and the 
New York Ohurchman, then edited by the well-known 
Dr. Seabury, announced in its prefatory remarks to 
some extracts it made from it, that a new era had 
dawned on the Puritan city of Boston ; the fifth, 
sixth, and seventh, attracted the attention of the 
Catholic journals, which reproduced them, or por- 
tions of them, with approbatory remarks. The eighth, 
which was to answer the question, which is the 
true Church or Body of Christ, the publisher of The 
Christian World refused to insert, and therefore was 
not published. A Catholic editor kindly offered me 
the use of his columns, but I respectfully declined 



354 THE CONVERT. 

his offer. The essay was the concluding one, and as 
I hesitated, and evaded a direct answer to the ques- 
tion raised, I was not sorry that I had a good excuse 
for not publishing it. 

Till I commenced writing this series of essays, I 
had no thought of ever becoming a Eoman Catholic, 
and it was not till I saw my articles copied into a 
Catholic journal that even the possibility of such a 
termination of my researches presented itself to my 
mind. I found myself with my starting-point led 
by an invincible logic to assert the CathoHc Church 
as the true Church or living body of Christ. To be 
logical, I saw I must accept that Church, and accept 
her as authoritative for natural reason, and then 
take her own explanation of herself and of her doc- 
trines as true. All my principles required me, and 
my first impulse, in the enthusiasm of the moment, 
was to do it ; yet I hesitated, and it was over a year 
before I made up my mind to submit myself to her 
instructions and directions. 

My doctrine of life or communion did not include 
in itself, as I supposed, the whole of Catholicity, 
but in assuming it to be true, and a fair expression 



A STEP FORWARD. 355 

of the rational elements of Catholic theology, there 
was no great error. It did not bring me into the Cath- 
olic Church, but it did bring me to the recognition of 
those great principles, which, taken in connection 
with the unquestioned historical facts in the case, 
required me either to renounce my reason, or go 
farther and accept the Church and her doctrines, in 
her own sense, not merely in the sense in which I 
had asserted them in my philosophy. But this I 
was not at once prepared to do ; and for the first 
time in my life I refused to follow out my principles, 
so long as I held them, and to accept their last con- 
sequences. 

I have been accused of precipitancy and rashness 
in submitting myself to the Catholic Church, but the 
fact is that I betrayed inexcusable weakness in not 
submitting to her much sooner than I did. I was 
quite willing to accept the Church in the abstract, 
and defend, in a general way. Catholicity as I 
understood it, but I had so long been accustomed 
to consider the claims of the present Catholic Church 
as out of the question, that I found it difficult to 
make up my mind to accept them. I was imwilling 



356 THE CONVERT. 

to believe that tlie Eeformation had had no reason 
against her, and that the whole Protestant move- 
ment had been wholly wrong from the beginning. I 
was not prepared either in words or deeds to condemn 
outright the whole Protestant world, so large a por- 
tion of mankind, and that, as I had been accustomed 
to believe, the more moral, enlightened, and ener- 
getic portion. I had formed but a poor opinion of 
Eoman Catholics, and was far from being willing to 
cast in my lot with them. I had, indeed, few Cath- 
olic acquaintances, and had only Protestant repre- 
sentations from which to form my opinion, but I had 
not as yet learned to question the substantial truth- 
fulness of those representations. One or two mod- 
em Catholic controversial works had fallen in my 
way, and I had attempted to read them, but they 
did not impress me favorably. They were written, 
as I thought, in a dry, feeble, and unattractive style, 
and abounded with terms and locutions which were 
to me totally unintelligible. Their authors seemed 
to me ignorant of the ideas and wants of the non- 
Catholic world, engrossed with obsolete questions, 
and wanting in broad and comprehensive views. 



A STEP FORWARD. 357 

Their method of arguing struck me as mere special 
pleading, turning on mere technicalities and verbal 
distinctions, evading the real merits of the questions 
debated, and puzzling rather than convincing the 
reason of their opponents. They struck me as cun- 
ning, as subtile, as adroit disputants, not as great, 
broad, or open-hearted men, who win at once your 
confidence in their intelligence and sincerity, and in 
the truth and honesty of their cause ; and, in point 
of fact. Catholic controversialists are generally re- 
garded by Protestants very much in the light I re- 
garded them, that is, of lawyers speaking from their 
brief This, however, it is only fair to say, is not 
the fault of the Catholic party. 

Then I had been accustomed to regard the Cath- 
olic nations of Europe, since the time of Leo X., 
as unprogressive, and the mass of their populations as 
ignorant, degraded, enslaved, cowardly, and imbecile. 
I found Catholics, I thought, at the head of none of 
the great intellectual, political, social, literary, or sci- 
entific movements of the age. The great, energetic 
nations of the day were the non-Catholic nations. 
Great Britain, Kussia, and the United States. Even 



358 THE CONVERT. 

in so-called Catholic nations the ruling or governing 
mind had ceased to be Catholic. The majority of the 
French population were Catholic, but intellectual, 
literary, scientific, political France, was non-Catholic. 
The great French philosophers, writers, thinkers, 
those who directed the mind of the kingdom and 
represented it to foreigners, were far enough from be- 
ing attached to the Church. French journalism was 
almost without exception anti-Catholic. The men 
who made the old Eevolution, rejected the Church, and 
instituted the Eeign of Terror, were but a small mi- 
nority of the nation, and yet what availed the opposi- 
tion of the Catholic masses against them ? So in 
every Catholic State, power, learning, science, energy, 
is in the hands of non-Catholics, and the Catholic 
portion, though the immense majority, are governed 
by the non-Catholic minority. Where, I asked, is the 
Catholic who takes, in any nation, the lead in any 
branch of literature or science ? I did not attribute, 
I could not attribute this supposed inferiority of 
Catholics to nature or to Catholicity, but to the mis- 
taken policy of the Catholic clergy, who must have 
lost the deeper sense of their religion, become men of 



A STEP FORWARD. 359 

routine, and incapable of comprehending or meeting 
the wants of the age. Trained up in scrupulous igno- 
rance of the world, in a superannuated scholasticism, 
they were unfitted to act on the age, and to take the 
direction of the great movements of the race. Find- 
ing the intelligence of the age against them, they had 
set their faces against intelligence ; finding efforts to 
extend freedom, and to carry on the progress of man 
and society directed by their enemies, they had con- 
demned those efforts, thrown themselves on the side 
of absolutism, and labored to keep the masses in 
ignorance and slavery, that they might keep them in 
the faith. Taking this view, and only partially un- 
derstanding its explanation, how could I but shrink 
from uniting with the present Catholic Church ? 

Nor was this all. To pass from one Protestant 
sect to another is a small affair, and is little more 
than going from one apartment to another in the 
same house. We remain still in the same world, in 
the same general order of thought, and in the midst 
of the same friends and associates. We do not go 
from the known to the unknown ; we are still within 
soundings, and may either return, if we choose, to the 



360 THE CONVERT. 

sect we have left, or press on to anotherj without 
serious loss of reputation, or any gross disturbance of 
our domestic and social relations. But to pass from 
Protestantism to Catholicity is a very different thing. 
We break with the whole world in which we have 
hitherto lived ; we enter into what is to us a new and 
untried region, and we fear the discoveries we may 
make there, when it is too late to draw back. To 
the Protestant mind this old Catholic Church is veiled 
in mystery, and leaves ample room to the imagination 
to people it with all manner of monsters, chimeras, 
and hydras dire. We enter it and leave no bridge 
over which we may return. It is a committal for life, 
for eternity. To enter it seemed to me, at first, like 
taking a leap in the dark, and it is not strange that 
I recoiled, and set my wits to work to find out, if pos- 
sible^ some compromise, some middle ground on which 
I could be faithful to my CathoHc tendencies without 
uniting myself with the present Eoman Catholic 
Church. 

I had, indeed, found the Church as aathoritative 
for natural reason, but I had not established her abso- 
lute infallibility, at least I did not see that I had. 



A STEP FORWAKD. 361 

The Divine-hTiman life whicli constituted the Church 
and was its informing principle, was indeed infallible, 
but as we receive this life only by communion with 
those who live it, and as according to the philosophy 
I then held, it is the subject that determines the 
form of the life or fact of consciousness, I could well 
concede that more or less of error might find its way 
into the concrete conceptions even of Catholics ; and 
as I had as yet failed to recognize the office of the 
Papacy, and supposed the infallibility of the Pope a 
doctrine which no enlightened Catholic accepted, for 
all the Catholics and Catholic books I was acquainted 
with took good care to state that it was no article of 
faithj I might without any very great inconsistency^ 
hold that the Catholic Church had committed' some 
mistakes, and impaired her Divine-human life. I 
had long been convinced that the Church in com- 
munion with the See of Eome had been the true body 
of Christ down to the age of Leo X., and I regarded 
the Apostolic See as the central source of the Chris- 
tian life ; but the body seemed to me to have been 
broken into fragments, and to exist no longer in its 
integrity. The Koman Catholic Church was un- 



362 THE CONVERT. 

doubtedly the larger fragment, the one through which 
the main current of the Divine-human life continued 
to flow ; but no man would dare say that nothing of 
that life is or can be lived outside of her communion, 
and I had found no Catholic that held there could be 
absolutely no salvation outside of it. The several sects 
when broken off retained a certain amount of Chris- 
tian life, that amount which Christendom had already 
assimilated, as is evident the moment you compare a 
Christian of any sect with a Pagan, a Mahometan, or 
any man born and living outside of Christian civiliza- 
tion. Moreover, all communion of the sects with one 
another and even with the Roman Church, has not 
been absolutely interrupted. There is more or less 
even of personal intercourse between them, and be- 
sides there is intercommunion through similar laws 
and institutions, and through a common literature 
and science. They all belong, in some sort, to one 
and the same family, and all, in a measure, live the 
one life of Christ. Though the divisions, separations, 
and schisms greatly enfeeble it, they do not abso- 
lutely extinguish it at once ; they only weaken it, 
and prepare by evil communications its final extinc- 



A STEP FORWARD. 363 

tion. The real difficulty is not that the Christian 
world does not live the life at all^ but that it does not 
live it in its unity and fulness. Undoubtedly they 
who are attached to the Koman Catholic fragment 
have the advantage, but instead of uniting ourselves 
with them, we should labor, from the point where 
Providence has placed us, to effect in the surest and 
speediest manner possible the reunion of all the frag- 
ments, and thus restore the body of Christ to its 
original unity and integrity. 

Here I came for a moment in contact with the 
so-called Oxford or Tractarian movement. I never 
for a moment seriously contemplated joining the An- 
glican communion, and, regarded in itself, Puseyism 
had no attractions for me. It was far better to go at 
once to Rome than to Oxford. But I looked upon 
the movement as one of great importance. It was a 
promising sign of the times, as indicating a tendency 
on the part of a large portion of the Protestant world 
to return to Church principles. It would be a great 
mistake to suppose that the Oxford movement was 
confined to the bosom of the Anglican communion. 
An analogous movement was perceptible in the bosom 



364 THE CONVERT. 

of every sect. Even in the Koman Catholic com- 
munion, there was a return towards higher and more 
living Church principles than those contended for in 
the eighteenth century, when a Bergier combats the 
Encyclopedists and defends Catholicity on principles 
borrowed from an infidel philosophy. In every Prot- 
estant sect there was in 1842 a movement party, at 
war with the fundamental principle of Protestantism, 
and demanding Church union and Church authority. 
It seemed that Protestantism had culminated, that 
the work of disintegration and destruction had gone 
so far that it could go no farther, and that a reaction 
in earnest, and not likely to be suspended, had com- 
menced through the whole Christian world against 
the Protestant Keformation. The letters, which I 
was constantly receiving from prominent Protestant 
ministers of the more important and influential sects, 
denouncing the Keformation as a blunder, asserting 
the necessity of re-uniting the Protestant world with 
the Catholic, was to me a proof of it. The secret his- 
tory of my own country for several years prior to 1844, 
would reveal a Catholic reaction in the more serious 
portion of the Protestant sects that would surprise 



A STEP FOKWARD. 365 

those who look only on the surface of things. I was 
aware of this reaction^ and I hoped from it the union 
of Christendom. The thing to be done was to en- 
courage this reaction^ to strengthen it, and by bring- 
ing out, each one from his own stand-point, true 
Church principles, to Catholicize the several Protes- 
tant sects, and prepare them for reunion with the 
Catholic Church in a body. 

With this view I greeted Puseyism as the most 
important movement of the times, and was from my 
stand-point as a Congregational Unitarian, prepared 
to co-operate with it, as well as with analogous 
movements elsewhere, and in the bosom of other 
communions. In order to do this, having for the 
year 1843 discontinued my Keview, I started another 
Quarterly, which I still continue. I started it under 
my own name, and as the organ of my own views, 
but with the real aim of contributing my share 
towards effecting the reunion of Christendom by ex- 
pounding and defending the Catholicity to which my 
doctrine of life or communion had conducted me. I 
was then forty years of age, in the full vigor of mind 
and body, and had won for myself a respectable posi- 



366 THE CONVERT. 

tion in the American literary world^ as the list of 
names voluntarily sent in as subscribers to the new 
Keview immediately on the appearance of the first 
number fully proved. I was warmly greeted in quar- 
ters where I had hitherto been only denounced or 
not recognized^ and I felt that for the first time in my 
life I had the sentiments of the better portion of the 
community with me. But I soon found it difficult 
to maintain my independent position, or to defend 
the theory on which I was acting. The Koman 
Catholics looked on, but said little ; several of their 
clergy, as I have since learned, said Mass for my con- 
version, and many, I have no doubt, in their prayers 
recommended me to Our Lady. The Euseyites 
thought I leaned too much to Eome, and was en- 
couraging her in her pretensions. My Unitarian 
friends thought I was too Orthodox, too strenuous 
for authority, and that I allowed too little scope to 
individual reason ; and, what was more to the pur- 
pose, I was dissatisfied with myself. My position, 
asserting the Church and the necessity of commu- 
nion with her as the condition of living the life of 
Christ, and yet really standing aloof from all com- 



A STEP FORWARD. 367 

munions, belonging in fact to no church, struck me 
the moment I began to consider it, as anomalous, 
nay, as untenable. Was I living the Christian life 
myself ? If so, what was the value of my reasoning 
in behalf of the reunion of Christendom, and of com- 
munion with the body of Christ ? If not, if I was 
not living that life myself, what was in fact my own 
personal condition and my future prospects ? Sup- 
pose I die before I have effected the reunion of Chris- 
tendom — what will become of my own soul ? I am 
engaged in a good work, but what if I become myself 
a castaway ? Here is matter for serious thought. 



CHAPTEE XVIII. 

BECOME A CATHOLIC. 

The work of conversion is^ of course, the work of grace, 
and without grace no man can come into the Church 
any more than he can enter heaven. No merely- 
human process does or can suffice for it, and I am 
far enough from pretending that I became a Catholic 
by my own unassisted efforts. "Without the grace di- 
vinely bestowed, and bestowed without any merit of 
mine, all my labors would have been in vain. It was 
divine grace that conducted me, rolled back the dark- 
ness before me, and inclined my heart to believe. 
But grace does not exclude reason, or voluntary co- 
operation, and conversion itself, though a work of 
free grace, includes, inasmuch as it is the conversion 
of a rational subject, a rational process, though not 
always distinctly noted by the convert. All I am doing 



BECOME A CATHOLIC. 369 

is to detail the rational process by which^ not with- 
out but with divine grace, I came into the Church, 
and that not for those who are within, but for those 
who are without. Those who are within have no 
need in their own case of the process, for they have 
the life, and the life evidences itself, and they know 
in whom they believe, and are certain. But this sort 
of evidence they who are without have not, and we 
cannot allege it as evidence to them. They could 
take it only on our word, and they have no more 
reason to take our word than they have to take that of 
Evangelicals, who pretend to the same sort of evi- 
dence in their favor. It is necessary, therefore, to 
show them that there is a rational process included 
in the case, and to show them as clearly as may be 
what that process is. 

The process I have detailed, or life by communion, 
did not, as I have said, bring me into the Church, 
but taken in connection with the admitted historical 
facts in the case, it did remove all my a priori ob- 
jections, and bring me to the recognition of the Church 
as authoritative, by virtue of the Divine-human life 

it lived, for natural reason. This was not all that 
16* 



370 THE CONVERT. 

s 

I needed, but it was mucli, and required me to go 
farther, and submit myself to ber and take her own 
explanation of herself and of her dogmas. I saw this 
clear enough, but my reluctance to become a Koman 
Catholic prevented me from doing so at once. Yet 
even from the first, even from the moment I came to 
the recognition of the Church as authoritative, I 
felt, though I refused personally to change my posi- 
tion, that I must take what had evidently been her 
positive teaching for my guide, and in no instance 
contradict it. 

It was evident, without any special instruction, 
that the Church, that the whole Christian world pro- 
posed a very different end, as the true end of life, from 
the one I had proposed to myself, and for which during 
nearly twenty years, in my feeble way, I had been 
laboring. As a practical fact, the Church, no doubt, 
really does aid the progress of society, and tend to 
give us a heaven even on earth, but this is not the 
end she proposes, or what she directly aims to effect. 
The end she proposes is not attainable in this world, 
and the heaven she points to is a reward to be re- 
ceived only after this hfe. There could be no doubt 



BECOME A CATHOLIC. 371 

that she taught endless beatitude as the reward of 
the good, and endless misery as the punishment of 
the wicked. The good are they who in this world 
live the life of Christy the wicked are they who live 
it not, and even refuse to live it. There needs no 
church or priest to tell me that I am not living that 
life, and that if I die as I am I shall assuredly go to 
hell. Now as I have no wish to go to hell, some- 
thing must be done, and done without delay. 
/- It is all very well, no doubt, to follow the exam- 
/ pie of the weeping Isis, and seek to gather up the 
fragments of the torn body of our Lord, and restore 
it to its unity and integrity, but what will it avail 
me if I remain severed from that body, and refuse 
to do what the Church commands ? How can I con- 
I sistently ask the obedience of others while I refuse 
my own ? Kewards and punishments are personal, 
i and meted out to men as individuals, not as collect- 
ive bodies. There is, then, but one rational course 
for me to take, that of going to the Church, and 
; begging her to take charge of me, and do with me 
' what she judges proper. As the Koman Catholic 
Church is clearly the Church of history, the only 



372 THE CONVERT. 

Church that can have the slightest historical claim 
to be regarded as the body of Christ, it is to her I 
must gOj and her teachings, as given through her pas- 
tors, that I must accept as authoritative for natural 
reason. It was, no doubt, unpleasant to take such a 
step, but to be eternally damned would, after all, 
be a great deal unpleasanter. Accordingly, with 
fear and trembling, and yet with firmness of pur- 
pose, in the last week of May, 1844, I sought 
an interview with the late Eight Eeverend Benedict 
Joseph Fenwick, the learned Bishop of Boston, and 
in the following week visited him again, avowed my 
wish to' become a Catholic, and begged him to be 
so kind as to introduce me to some one who would 
take the trouble to instruct me, and prepare me for 
reception, if found worthy, into the communion of 
the Church. He immediately introduced me to his 
coadjutor, who has succeeded him, the Eight Eev- 
erend John Bernard Fitzpatrick, D. D. Of Bishop 
Fenwick, .who died in the peace of the Lord, August 
12, 1846, and who has left a memory precious to the 
American Church, I have given, in my Eeview for 
the following October, a sketch to which I can add 



BECOME A CATHOLIC. 373 

nothing^ and from whicli I have nothing to abate. 
He was a native of Maryland, descended from an old 
Catholic family that came over with the first settlers 
of the Colony, and to whom the American Church 
is indebted for some of her brightest ornaments. He 
was a great and good man, a man of various and 
solid learning, a tender heart, unaffected piety, and 
untiring zeal in his ministry. Delicacy and his own 
retiring character prevent me from speaking of his 
successor, the present Bishop of Boston, in the terms 
which naturally present themselves. He was my in- 
structor, my confessor, my spiritual director, and my 
personal friend, for eleven years ; my intercourse with 
him was intimate, cordial, and affectionate, and I owe 
him more than it is possible for me to owe to any 
other man. I have met men of more various erudi- 
tion and higher scientific attainments ; I have met 
men of bolder fancy and more creative imaginations ; 
but I have never met a man of a clearer head, a firm- 
er intellectual grasp, a sounder judgment, or a warm- 
er heart. He taught me my catechism and my the- 
ology ; and, though I have found men who made a 
far greater display of theological erudition, I have 



374 THE CONVERT. 

never met an abler or sounder theologian. However 
for a moment I may have been attracted by one or 
another theological school, I have invariably found 
myself obhged to come back at last to the views he 
taught me. If my Eeview has any theological merit, 
if it has earned any reputation as a stanch and un- 
compromising defender of the Catholic faith, that 
merit is principally due, under God, to him, to his 
instructions, to his advice, to his encouragement, and 
his uniform support. Its faults, its short-comings, 
or its demerits, are my own. I know that in saying 
this I offend his modesty, his unaffected Christian 
humility ; but less I could not say without violence 
to my own feelings, the deep reverence, the warm 
love, and profound gratitude with which I always re- 
call, and trust I always shall recall his name, and his 
services to me. 

Bishop Fitzpatrick received me with civihty, but 
with a certain degree of distrust. He had been a 
little prejudiced against me, and doubted the motives 
which led so proud and so conceited a man, as he 
regarded me, to seek admission into the Communion 
of the Church. It was two or three months before 



BECOME A CATHOLIC. 375 

we could come to a mutual understanding. There 
was a difficulty in the way that I did not dare ex- 
plain to him^ and he instinctively detected in me 
a want of entire frankness and unreserve. I had 
been led to the Church by the application I had 
made of my doctrine of life by communion^ and I 
will own that I thought that I found in it a method 
of leading others to the Church which Catholics had 
overlooked or neglected to use. I really thought 
that I had made some philosophical discoveries 
which would be of value even to Catholic theo- 
logians in convincing and converting unbelievers, and 
I dreaded to have them rejected by the Catholic 
Bishop. But I perceived almost instantly that he 
either was ignorant of my doctrine of life, or placed 
no confidence in it, and I felt that he was far more 
likely, bred as he had been in a different philosophi- 
cal school from myself, to oppose than to accept it. 
I had indeed, however highly I esteemed* the doctrine, 
no special attachment to it for its own sake, and 
could, so far as it was concerned, give it up at a word, 
without a single regret ; but, if I rejected or waived 
it, what reason had I for regarding the Church as 



376 THE CONVERT. 

authoritative for niatural reason, or for recognizing 
any authority in the Bishop himself to teach me ? 
Here was the difficulty. 

This difficulty remained a good while. I dared 
not state it, lest the Cathohc Bishop himself should 
deprive me of all reason for becoming a Catholic, and 
send me back into the world utterly naked and des- 
titute. I had made up my mind that the Church 
was my last plank of safety, that it was communion 
with the Church or death. I must be a Catholic, 
and yet could not and would not be one blindly. I 
had gone it blind once, and had lost all, and would 
not do so again. My trouble was great, and the 
Bishop could not relieve me, for I dared not disclose 
to him its source. But Providence did not desert 
me, and I soon discovered that there was another 
method, by which, even waiving the one which I had 
thus far followed, I could arrive at the authority of 
the Church, and prove, even in a clearer and more 
direct manner, her Divine commission to teach all 
men and nations in all things pertaining to eternal 
salvation. This new process or method I found was 
as satisfactory to reason as my own. I adopted it, and 



BECOME A CATHOLIC. 377 

hencefortli used it as tlie rational basis of my argu- 
ment for the Church. So, in point of fact, I was 
not received into the Church on the strength of the 
philosophical doctrine I had embraced, but on the 
strength of another, and perhaps a more convincing 
process. 
1/ It is not necessary to develop this new process 
here, for it is the ordinary process adopted by Catho- 
lic theologians, and may be found drawn out at length 
in almost every modern Course of Theology. It may, 
also, be found developed under some of its aspects in 
almost any article I have since written in my Keview, 
but more especially in an article entitled The Church 
against No-Churchy published April, 1845. I found 
it principally in Billuart's Treatises de Deo^ de Fide, 
de Regulis Fidei, and de Ecclesia; and an excellent 
summary and lucid statement of it, or what are usu- 
ally called '^ motives of credibility,'" may be found in 
Pointer's Evidences of Christianity^ and also in the 
Evidences of Catholicity ^ by Dr. Spalding, the present 
able and learned Bishop of Louisville, Kentucky. 
Though I accepted this method and was satisfied by 
it before I entered the Church, yet it was not that 



378 THE CONVERT. 

by whicli I was brouglit from unbelief to tbe Church, 
and it only served to justify and confirm by another 
process, the convictions to which I had been brought 
by my application to history and the traditions of the 
race, of the doctrine of life obtained from the simple 
analysis of thought as a fact of consciousness. What 
would have been its practical effect on my mind, had 
I encountered it before I had in fact become a be- 
liever, and in reality had no need of it for my personal 
conviction, I am unable to say, though I suspect it 
would never have brought me to the Church, — not 
because it is not logical, not because it is not objec- 
tively complete and conclusive, but because I wanted 
the internal or subjective disposition to understand 
and receive it. It would not have found, if I may so 
say, the needed subjective response, and would have 
failed to remove to my understanding the a priori 
objections I entertained to a supernatural authorita- 
tive revelation itself. It would, I think, have struck 
me as crushing instead of enlightening, silencing in- 
stead of convincing my reason. Certainly, I have 
never found the method effectual in the case of any 
non-Catholic not already disposed to become a Catho- 



BECOME A CATHOLIC. 379 

Kc, or actually, in his belief, on the way to the 
Church. 

// The argument of our theologians is scholastic, 
severe, and conclusive for the pure intellect that is 

' in the condition to listen to it, but it seems to me 
better adapted, practically, to confirm believers and 
guard them against the specious objections of their 
enemies, than to convince unbelievers. Man is not 
pure intellect ; he is body as well as soul, and full 
of prejudices and passions. His subjective objections 
are more weighty than his objective objections, and 
the main difficulties of the unbeliever lie, in our times, 
farther back than the ordinary motives of credibility 
reach. It strikes me that my method, though it can 
by no means supersede theirs, might be advanta- 
geously used as a preparation for theirs ; not as an 
Evangelical Preparation, but as a preparation for the 
usual Evangelical Preparation presented by theolo- 
gians, especially in this age when the objections are 
drawn from philosophy rather than from history, 
from feeling rather than from logic. 

Having however found the other method of justi- 
fying my recognition of the Church as authority for 



380 THE CONVERT. 

reason, I dropped for the time the doctrine of life, 
and soon came, without any discussion of its merits 
or demerits, to a good understanding with the Bishop, 
who after a few weeks of further instniction, heard 
my confession, which included the whole period of 
my life from the time of my joining the Presbyteri- 
ans, received my abjuration, administered to me con- 
ditional Baptism, and the Sacrament of Confirmation, 
on Sunday, October 20, 1844, when I had just entered 
the 42d year of my age, and just twenty-two years 
after I had joined the Presbyterians. The next 
morning at early Mass I received Holy Communion, 
from the hands of Eev. Nicholas A. O'Brien, then 
Pastor of the Church in East Boston. The great 
step had been taken, and I had entered upon a new 
life, subdued indeed, but full of a sweet and calm 
joy. No difficulties with regard to the particular 
doctrines of the Church had at any time arisen, for, 
satisfied that Almighty God had commissioned the 
Church to teach, and that the Holy Ghost was ever 
present by his supernatural aid to assist her to teach, 
I knew that she could never teach any thing but 
truth. The fact that she taught a doctrine was a 



BECOME A CATHOLIC. 381 

sufficient reason for accepting it^ and I had only to 
be assured of her teaching it in order to believe it. 

As I did not make use in the last moment of my 
doctrine of communion^ and as I had no occasion for 
it afterwards for my own mind, I made no further 
use of it, and when I addressed the public again pro- 
ceeded to defend my Catholic faith by the method 
ordinarily adopted by Catholic writers. I did this, 
because, seeing the Catholic Church and her dogmas 
to be infinitely more than that doctrine had enabled 
me to conceive, I attached for the moment no great 
importance to it. It certainly was not all I had sup- 
posed it, and it might prove to be nothing at all. 
It had served as a scaffolding, but now the temple 
was completed, it might serve only to obscure its 
beauty and fair proportions. At any rate, that and 
all other philosophical theories which I had formed 
while yet unacquainted with the Church should be 
suffered to sleep, till I had time and opportunity to 
reexamine them in the light of Cathohc faith and 
theology. It did not comport with the modesty and 
humility of a recent convert to be obtruding theories 
of his own upon the Catholic public, or to insist on 



382 THE CONVEKT. 

methods of defending Catholic doctrine, adopted 
while he was a non-Catholic, and not recognized by 
Catholic theologians. Was it likely I had discovered 
any thing of value that had escaped the great theo- 
logians and doctors of the Church ? 

But this suppression of my own philosophic theo- 
ry, a suppression under every point of view commend- 
able and even necessary at the time, became the 
occasion of my being placed in a false position to- 
wards my non-Catholic friends. Many had read me, 
seen well enough whither I was tending, and were 
not surprised to find me professing myself a Catholic. 
The doctrine 1 brought out, and which they had fol- 
lowed, appeared to them, as it did to me, to authorize 
me to do so, and perhaps not a few of them were 
making up their minds to follow me ; but they were 
thrown all aback the first time they heard me 
speaking as a Catholic, by finding me defending 
my conversion on grounds of which I had given no 
public intimation, and which seemed to them wholly 
unconnected with those I had pubHshed. Unable 
to perceive any logical or intellectual connection 
between my last utterances before entering the 



BECOME A CATHOLIC. 383 

Church and my first utterances afterwards, they 
looked upon my conversion, after all^ as a sudden 
caprice, or rash act taken from a momentary impulse, 
or in a fit of intellectual despair, for which I had in 
reality no good reason to offer. So they turned 
away in disgust, and refused to trouble themselves 
any longer with the reasonings of one on whom so 
little reliance could be placed, and who could act 
without any rational motive for his action. 
\ Evidently this was unpleasant, but I could not 
set the matter right at the time, by showing that 
there really had been a continuity in my intellectual 
life, and that I had not broken with my former self 
so abruptly or so completely as they supposed. Till 
I had had time to review my past writings in the 
light of my new faith, the matter was uncertain in 
my own mind, and it was my duty, so far as the pub- 
lic was concerned, to let the doctrine sleep, and to 
write and publish nothing but what I had a warrant 
for in the approved writers of the Church. I acted 
prudently, as it was proper I should act, and I should 
continue to do so still, and not have written the 
present book and taken up the connecting link, had 



384 THE CONVERT. 

not nearly thirteen years of Catholic experience and 
study enabled me to perceive that the doctrine of 
life I asserted is in no way incompatible with any Cath- 
olic principle or doctrine I have become acquainted 
with, and that it did legitimately lead me to the 
Catholic Church. I do not mean, that, as a doctrine 
of philosophy, it bridges over the gulf between the 
natural and supernatural, for that no philosophy can 
do, since philosophy is only the expression of natural 
reason ; but I honestly believe, as I believed in 
1844, that it does, better than any other philosophi- 
cal doctrine, show the harmony between the natural 
and the supernatural, and remove those obstacles to 
the reception of the Church, and her doctrines on 
her authority, which all intelhgent and thinking men 
brought up outside of the Church in our day do 
really encounter. I believe I am not only cleariag 
myself of an unfounded suspicion of having acted ca- 
priciously, from mental instability, or mental despair, 
in joining the Church, which were a small affair, but 
also a real service to a large class of minds who still 
remember me, by recalling it and showing them that 
in substance I still hold and cherish it. 



BECOME A CATHOLIC. 385 

My Catholic friends cannot look upon my doing 
so, after years of probation, as indicative of any de- 
parture from the diffidence and humility which at 
first restrained me from putting it forth. The doc- 
trine is new only in form, not in substance, and is 
only a development and application of principles 
which every Catholic theologian does and must hold. 
The fact that it was first developed and applied by 
one outside of the Church, and served to bring him 
to the Church, since it is not repugnant to any prin- 
ciple of Catholic faith or theology, is rather in its 
favor, for it creates a presumption that it really con- 
tains something fitted to reach a certain class of 
minds at least, and to remove the obstacles they 
experience in yielding assent to the claims of the 
Church. Non-Catholics do not, indeed, know Cath- 
olicity as well as Catholics know it, but they know 
better their own objections to it, and what is neces- 
sary to remove them. If in investigating questions 
before them, in attempting to establish a system of 
their own, with no thought of seeking either to be- 
lieve Catholicity, or to find an answer to the objec- 
tions they feel to the Church, they find these objec- 
17 



386 THE CONYERT. 

tions suddenly answered, and themselves forced, by 
principles wluch they have adopted, to recognize the 
Church as authority for reason, it is good evidence that 
these principles, and the methods of reasoning they 
authorize, are well adapted to the purpose of the de- 
fenders of the faith, and not unworthy of the atten- 
tion of Catholic controversialists, when, as in my case, 
they neither supersede nor interfere with the ordinary 
methods of theologians. 

Motives of credibility or methods of proof should 
be adapted to the peculiar character and wants of 
the age, or class of persons addressed. Philosophy 
could never have attained to Christian revelation, or 
the sacred mysteries of our holy religion ; but now 
that the revelation is made, that the mysteries are 
revealed, we know that alj sound philosophy does and 
must accord with them ; must, as far as it goes, pre- 
pare the mind to receive them ; and taken in connec- 
tion with the historical facts in the case, must 
demand them as its own complement. Now, if I am 
not mistaken, a philosophy of this sort has become 
indispensable. The age is skeptical, I grant, but its 
skepticism relates rather to the prevailing philosophy 



BECOME A CATHOLIC. 387 

than to reason, of which that philosophy professes to 
be the exponent. It distrusts reasoning rather than 
reason. It has no confidence in the refinements and 
sulBtilties of schoolmen, and though often sophisti- 
cal, it is in constant dread of being cheated out of its 
wits by the sophistry of the practised logician. 
Conclusions in matters of religion, which are arrived 
at only by virtue of a long train of reasoning, even 
when it perceives no defect in the premises and no 
flaw in the reasoning, do not command its assent, for 
it fears there may still be something wrong either in 
the reasoning or the premises, which escapes its sa- 
gacity. The ordinary motives of credibility do not 
move non-Catholics to beheve, because these motives 
start from principles which they do not accept, or 
accept with so much vagueness and uncertainty, that 
they do not serve to warrant assent even to strictly lo- 
gical conclusions drawn from them. Moreover, they do 
not reach their peculiar difficulties, do not touch 
their real objections ; and though they seem over- 
whelming to Catholics, they leave all their objections 
remaining in full force, and their inability to believe 
undiminished. 



388 THE CONVERT. 

The reason is in the fact that the philosophy 
which prevails^ and after which the modern mind 
iS; in some sense^ moulded^ is opposed to Christian 
revelation, and does not recognize as fundamental 
the principles or premises which warrant the conclu- 
sions drawn in favor of Christianity. The prevalent 
philosophy with very nearly the whole scientific cul- 
ture of the age, is not only un-Christian, but anti- 
Christian, and if accepted, renders the Christian faith 
an impossibility for a logical mind. There is always 
lurking in the mind a suspicion of the antecedent 
improbability of the whole Evangelical doctrine. 
^j Apologists may say, and say truly, that there is and 
can be no contradiction between philosophy and faith, 
but, unhappily, the philosophy between which and faith 
there is no contradiction, is not generally recognized. 
Between the oflScial and prevalent philosophy of the day, 
between the principles which have passed from that 
philosophy into the general mind, and Catholic faith, 
there is a contradiction, and not a few Catholics 
even retain their faith only in spite of their philosophy. 
The remedy is in revising our philosophy, and in 
placing it in harmony with the great principles of 



BECOME A CATHOLIC. 389 

Catholic faith. I will not say with Bonetty that the 
method of the Scholastics leads to rationalism and 
infidelity, for that is not true ; but I will say that that 
method, as developed and applied in the modern 
world, especially the non-Catholic world, does not 
serve as a preamble to faith, and does place the mind 
of the unbeliever in a state unfitted to give to the 
ordinary motives of credibility their due weight, or 
any weight at all. 

Modern philosophy is mainly a method, and de- 
velops a method of reasoning instead of presenting 
principles to intellectual contemplation. It takes up 
the question of method before that of principles, and 
seeks by the method to determine the principles, in- 
stead of leaving the principles to determine the 
method. Hence it becomes simply a doctrine of sci- 
ence, Wissenschaftslehre^ a doctrine of abstractions, 
or pure mental conceptions, instead of being, as it 
should be, a doctrine of reality, of things divine and hu- 
man. It is cold, lifeless, and ofiers only dead forms, 
which satisfy neither the intellect nor the heart. It 
does not, and cannot move the mind towards life and 
reality. It obscures first principles, and impairs the 



390 THE CONVERT. 

native force and trutlifulness of the intellect. The 
evil can be remedied only by returning from this 
philosophy of abstractions, — ^from modern psychology, 
or subjectivism, to the philosophy of reality, the phi- 
losophy of life, which presents to the mind the first 
principles of all life and of all knowledge as identical. 
Herein is the value of the process by which I 
arrived at the Church. I repeat again and again, 
that philosophy did not conduct me into the Church, 
but just in proportion as I advanced towards a sound 
philosophy, I did advance towards the Church. As 
I gained a real philosophy, a philosophy which takes 
its principles from the order of being, from life, from 
things as they are or exist, instead of the abstractions 
of the schools, faith flowed in, and I seized with joy 
and gladness the Christian Church and her dogmas. 
The non-Catholic world is far less in love with heresy 
or infidelity than is commonly supposed, and our ar- 
guments, clear and conclusive as they are to us, fail 
because they fail to meet their objections, and con- 
vince their reason. They are not addressed to rea- 
son as it is developed in them, and answer not their 
objections as they themselves apprehend them. The 



BECOME A CATHOLIC, 391 

non-Catholic world is not deficient in logical force or 
mental acuteness^ but it expresses itself in broad 
generalizations, rather than in precise and exact 
statements. Its objections are inductions from partic- 
ulars, vaguely apprehended and loosely expressed, 
are more subjective than objective, and rarely admit 
of a rigid scientific statement or definition. To de- 
fine them after the manner of the schools, and to 
reduce them to a strictly logical formula, is in most 
cases to refute them ; but the non-Catholic is not 
thus convinced that they are untenable, for he feels 
them still remaining in his mind. He attributes 
their apparent refutation to some logical sleight-of- 
hand, or dialectic jugglery, which escapes his detec- 
tion. He remains unconvinced, because his objection 
has been met by a refutation which has given no new 
light to his understanding, or made him see any 
higher or broader principles than he was before in 
possession of. 

An external refutation of the unbeliever's objec- 
tions effects nothing, because the real objection is in- 
ternal, and the refutation leaves the internal as it 
was before. The secret of convincing is not to put 



392 THE CONVERT. 

error out of the mind, but truth into it. There is 
Kttle use in arguing against the objections of non- 
Catholics, or in laboring directly for their refutation. 
We can effectually remove them only by correcting 
the premises from which the unbeliever reasons, 
and giving him first principles, which really enhghten 
his" reason, and as they become operative, expel his 
error by their own light and force. This can be done 
only by bringing the age back, or up to a philosophy 
which conforms the order of knowledge to the order of 
being, the logical order to the order of reality, and 
gives the first principles of things as the first principles 
of science. If Catholicity be from God, it does and 
must conform to the first principles of things, to the 
order of reality, to the laws of life or intelligence, and 
hence a philosophy which conforms to the same order 
will conform to Catholicity, and supply all the ra- 
tional elements of Catholic theology. Such a philoso- 
phy is the desideratum of the age, and we must have 
it, not as a substitute for faith, but as its preamble, 
as its handmaid, or we cannot recall the non-believing 
world to the Church of God ; because it is only by such 
a philosophy that we can really enlighten the mind of 



BECOME A CATHOLIC. 393 

the unbeliever, and really and effectually remove his 
objections, or show that it is in fact true that there 
is no contradiction between Catholicity and philos- 
ophy. 

The greatest and most serious difficulty in the 
way of the unbeliever, is his inability to reconcile 
faith and reason, that is, the Divine plan in the order 
of grace with the Divine plan evident in the order of 
nature. The Christian order appears to him as an 
after-thought, as an anomaly, if not a contradiction, 
in the general plan of Divine Providence, incompati- 
ble with the perfections of God, which we must ad- 
mit, if we admit a God at all. It strikes him as 
unforeseen, and not contemplated by the Divine 
Mind in the original intention to create, and as 
brought in to remedy the defects of creation, or to 
make amends for an unexpected and deplorable fail- 
ure. The two orders, again, seem to stand apart, 
and to imply a dualism, in fact, an antagonism, 
which it is impossible to reconcile with the unity and 
perfections of God. If God is infinite in all his at- 
tributes, in wisdom, power, and goodness, why did he 
not make nature perfect, or aU he desired it, in the 



394 THE CONVERT. 

beginning, so as to have no need to interfere, to re- 
pair, or to amend it, or to create a new order in its 
place, or even to preserve it, and avert its total ruin ? 
It is of no use to decry such thoughts and questions 
as irreverent, as impious, as blasphemous ; for they 
arise spontaneously in the unbelieving mind, and de- 
nunciation will not suppress them. It will serve no 
purpose to bring in here the ordinary motives of cre- 
dibility, drawn from the wants of nature, the insuffi- 
ciency of reason, prophecies, miracles, and historical 
monuments, for these only create new and equally 
grave difficulties. What is wanted is not argument, 
but instruction and explanation. It is necessary to 
show, not merely assert, that the two orders are not 
mutually antagonistic, that one and the same principle 
of life runs through them both, that they correspond 
one to the other, and really constitute but two parts 
of one comprehensive whole, and are equally em- 
braced in the original plan and purpose of God in 
creating. God could have created man, had he cho- 
sen, in a state of pure nature ; but in point of fact he 
did not, and nature has never for a single instant ex- 
isted as pure nature. It has, from the first moment 



BECOME A CATHOLIC. 395 

of its existence, been under a supernatural Providence; 
and even if man had not sinned, there would still 
have been a sufficient reason for the Incarnation, to 
raise human nature to union with God, to make it 
the nature of God, and to enable us, through its ele- 
vation, to enjoy endless beatitude in heaven. 

The doctrine that all dependent life is life by 
communion of the subject with the object, shows that 
this is possible, shows the common principle of the 
two orders, and thus prepares the mind to receive 
and yield to the arguments drawn from the wants of 
nature, the insufficiency of reason, prophecies, mir- 
acles, and historical monuments ; for it shows these 
to be in accordance with the original intent of the 
Creator, and that these wants and this insufficiency, 
are wants and insufficiency, not in relation to the 
purely natural order, but in relation to the supernat- 
ural. Natural reason is sufficient for natural reason, 
but it is not sufficient for man ; for man was intend- 
ed from the beginning to live simultaneously in two 
orders, the one natural and the other supernatural. 

Taking into consideration the fact that the skep- 
ticism of our age lies further back than the ordinary 



396 THE CONVEET. 

motives of credibility extend — ^further back tban did 
the skepticism our ancestors bad to meet^ and shows 
itself under a different form, I believe the process 
by which I was conducted towards the Church is not 
only a legitimate process in itself, but one which, in 
these times, in abler hands than mine, may be adopted 
with no little advantage. The present non-Cathohc 
mind has as much difficulty in admitting the motives 
of credibility, as usually urged, as it has in accepting 
Christianity without them. Prior to adducing them, 
we must, it seems to me, prepare the way for them, 
by rectifying our philosophy, and giving to our youth 
a philosophical doctrine which reproduces the order 
of things, of reality, of life ; not merely an order of 
dead abstractions. Such a philosophy, I think, will 
be found in that which underlies the process I have 
detailed ; and I hope it is no presumption or lack of 
modesty on my part, to recommend it to the atten- 
tion of the schools, as well as to the consideration of 
all whose office or vocation it is to combat the unbe- 
ief of the age and country. 



CHAPTEE XIX. 



BELIEF ON AUTHORITY. 



If I have made myself understood by tlie reader wlio 
has had the patience or the courtesy to follow me 
thus far, he will perceive that my submission to au- 
thority on becoming a Catholic, was very different 
from that which I yielded when I became a Presby- 
terian. In becoming a Presbyterian, I abandoned 
the use of reason ; in becoming a Catholic, I used 
my reason. In the one case, I submitted because I 
despaired of reason ; in the other, because I confided 
in it. The act of submitting to Presbyterianism 
was a rash act, an irrational act, an act of folly ; be- 
cause no man either can or should divest himself of 
reason, the essential and characteristic element of 
his nature ; and because I neither had nor asked any 
proof that the Presbyterian church had been insti- 



398 THE CONVERT. 

tuted by our Lord, and commissioned by him to 
teach me. All the objections usually urged against 
believing on authority, were vahd against my act of 
submission to Presbyterianism. But my act of sub- 
mission to the Catholic Church was an intelligent, 
a reasonable act ; an act of reason, though indeed 
of reason assisted by grace, because I had full evi- 
dence of the fact that she is God's Church, founded 
and sustained by him, and endowed with the au- 
thority and the ability to teach me in all things per- 
taining to salvation. I had proof satisfactory to 
reason, that God had himself instituted her as the 
medium of communion between him and men. To 
Presbyterianism I submitted blindly, without a suf- 
ficient reason ; to the Cathohc Church with my eyes 
open, with full light, because I had ample reason to 
believe that the authority I submitted to could not 
err, and because her authority, while it obliges, con- 
vinces. 

To all the Presbyterian doctrines my reason was 
opposed, and in following it I should not only not 
have believed them, but should have positively dis- 
believed them. To the Catholic doctrines I had no 



BELIEF ON AUTHORITY. 399 

a priori objections, and reason, if unable of herself 
alone to accept them, had nothing to oppose to them. 
Presbyterianism contradicted reason ; Catholicity- 
was above reason indeed, but still in accordance with 
it, and therefore credible without violence to reason 
or nature. In becoming a Presbyterian, I had to 
surrender common sense, and give up my natural 
beliefs and convictions ; in becoming a Catholic, I had 
very little to reject of what I had previously beld. 
I have found, on reviewing my past life, hardly a 
single positive conviction I ever held that I do not 
still hold, hardly a denial I ever made that I would 
not still make, if divested of my Catholic faith. I 
fell short of Catholicity, but in no instance, where I 
faithfully followed reason, did I run counter to it. 
The change I underwent was in taking on, rather 
than in casting off, and my Catholic faith was, under 
the grace of God, the slow and gradual accumulation 
of twenty 'five years of intense mental activity, and 
incessant struggle for Kght, and a religion on which 
I could rely. 

Belief on the authority of the Church, supposing 
that authority adequately proved or provable to rea- 



400 THE CONVERT. 

son to be from God, and really his authority, is the 
most reasonable thing in the world. All belief, as 
distinguishable from science, is mediate assent on 
authority or testimony, and to complain of the Cath- 
olic faith that it is assent on authority or testimony, 
is to complain that it is faith and not knowledge. 
No reasonable man will do that. The objection 
usually urged by non-Catholics is founded on a mis- 
apprehension of what Catholics really mean by be- 
lieving on authority. Authority in the gense of law, 
in the sense that it simply obliges without convinc- 
ing, cannot be a reasonable ground of belief The 
State may enact a creed, and command me to believe 
it, but I caimot, even if I would, believe it for that 
reason. There is no necessary or logical connection 
beween the enactment, or the command of the State, 
and the truth of the creed enjoined, and therefore it is 
and can be no reason why I should believe it. The 
command does and can throw no light on the truth 
of the creed; does and can produce, or aid in producing, 
no interior conviction, without which there is and can 
be no belief The authority of the Church taken in 
this sense is, indeed, no reason for believing, that is, 



BELIEF ON AUTHORITY. 401 

in SO far as belief is an act of the .understanding ; for 
in this sense authority can merely move the will, and 
no man can believe by simply wilhng to believe. " 

In Christian faith, subjectively considered, there is 
an act of the will and an act of the understanding. In 
so far as faith is an act of the will, we yield it, be- 
cause commanded to do so by our Sovereign ; and 
hence faith becomes an act of obedience, and is treat- 
ed by theologians as a virtue. But in so far as it is 
simply a belief or an act of the understanding, or a 
purely intellectual act, it is not and cannot be yielded 
as an act of obedience to authority, be that authority 
what it may. In this respect, I was right when I 
refused to believe because commanded, and in this 
respect Kationalists and all non-Catholics are right, 
when they object to believing on authority. Nothing 
is or can be authority for faith, whether human or 
divine, in so far as faith is an intellectual act, and 
distinguished from volition, or determination of the 
wiU, that does not at the same time that it com- 
mands the will, enlighten and convince the under- 
standing. Authority is authority for the under- 
standing, therefore for that intellectual assent which is 



402 THE CONVERT. 

called belief, only in that it enlightens and convinces 
reason, or is itself a full and satisfactory reason for 
believing, — a real light to the understanding. Noth- 
ing is more reasonable than to believe God at his 
word, but we cannot believe even him by reason that 
his word is a command ; we do so only by reason that 
his word is the word of eternal, immutable, and 
absolute Truth. It is overlooking this distinction, 
and taking authority in the sense that it commands, 
and not in the sense that it enlightens and convinces, 
that has excited the hostility to belief on authority, 
we so frequently encounter. 

All men, whatever their speculations, admit the 
authority of reason, and that what is really reasona- 
ble is really true and just. But reason is light and 
worthy of trust, only because God creates it, and is 
himself its immediate object and light. It is the 
participation of reason in the Divinity, by virtue of 
the communion of our reason with the Divine Eeason 
as its object, that renders reason itself authoritative, 
makes it reason or intellectual light at all. We see 
and know things even in the natural order, only be- 
cause God immediately affirms himself as the intelli- 



BELIEF ON AUTHORITY. 403 

gible, and by the light of his own being illuminating 
them, renders them visible or intelligible to us. The 
principle, or a parallel principle, holds in the Church. 
Her authority, though in a higher order, is of a nature 
parallel with the authority of reason. Keason is creat- 
ed, constituted by the act of God communicating to 
it the light and truth of his own being in the natural 
order, and its authority is the authority of the Di- 
vine light and truth communicated ; the Church is 
created, constituted by the act of Grod communicating 
to it the light and love of his own essence in the su- 
pernatural order, and its authority is the authority of 
his own essential light and love. The ground of the 
authority, and the principle of inward assent or con- 
viction is the same in both cases, and no reason can 
be assigned or conceived, why intellectual submission 
to the teaching of the Church should be less easy 
than submission to the dictates of reason, or why the 
one should be more or less derogatory from the rights 
and freedom of the mind than the other. The whole 
value of natural reason is derived from the presence 
of God in and to it, creating and illuminating it ; 
this is the sole ground of its existence and authority : 



404 THE CONVERT. 

the sole value of the teaching of the Church, the sole 
ground of her existence and authority, is in the super- 
natural presence of the Incarnate God in her and to 
her, creating and illuminating her. 

The commission to the Church of which Catho- 
lics so often speak, is not merely an external com- 
mission, given externally to a person foreign to the 
Divine Person of our Lord. The Church exists and 
lives by direct and immediate communion with the 
Incarnate God ; nay, is his body, and, as it were, 
the outward, or visible, or sensible continuation or 
representation on earth, of the Incarnation. Like 
our Lord himself, she is at once Divine and human. 
She is the union of the two natures with the two na- 
tures of Christ in one Divine person. Her authority 
thus derives, not from an external commission which 
is only its external sign or symbol, but from the reality 
of this union, from God himself dwelling in her, from 
the Paraclete or Spirit of Truth who inhabits her, 
and operates in her, as in the natural order he inhab- 
its natural reason, and operates in and through it. 
There is nothing formal or forensic in the case ; all 
is internal, real, living, and the Church is rendered 



BELIEF ON AUTHORITY. 405 

through the indwelling Holy Ghost, in relation to the 
intellect, the supernatural light and reason of God, 
which is all the most hesitatihg human reason 
can demand for its illumination and assent to what 
she teaches. 

An external commission may suffice for obedi- 
ence to an external command. I obey the powers 
that be, when they do not require me to disobey God, 
although I have no belief in their infallibility or in 
the intrinsic wisdom or expediency of their policy, 
because God commands me to do it ; so I obey, in 
the government and administration of external eccle- 
siastical affairs, the officers of the Church, although I 
do not believe them always wise or prudent, because 
they have been commissioned by Him who has the 
Sovereign right to command me, and I obey them for 
his sake. But when it comes to matters of belief, this 
external commission does not suffice. It must be 
internal as well as external, and carry with it the in- 
ternal light and ability that connects the authority 
indissolubly with the truth of what it teaches ; that 
is, the authority of the Church, to serve the demands 
of the intellect, though expressed through human 



406 THE CONVERT. 

organs, must be really the authority of God himself, 
in his infinite light and truth. Neither Popes nor 
Councils in their mere humanity, in their own nature, 
wisdom, sagacity, or virtue as men, do or can suffice 
as authority for believing a single Catholic dogma. 
No Pope, no member of a Council is in himself either 
infallible or impeccable, and no aggregation of falli- 
bles can make an infallible. No elevation of a man 
to an official station of itself renders him infallible, 
or adds any thing to his wisdom or knowledge. The 
Pope, if we look only to his external commission, as 
successor of St. Peter, would and could have only an 
official, only a reputed infallibility, — be infallible 
only in the sense of being the court of last resort, 
from which there lies no appeal, — the only sense in 
which the illustrious Count de Maistre seems to have 
recognized either the Pope or the Church as infalli- 
ble. The commission, if it communicates authority 
for reason, must communicate the ability which 
teaches the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but 
the truth. It is the Holy Ghost supernaturally as- 
sisting the Pope, and preserving, permanently or for 
the time being, his judgment from error, that consti- 



BELIEF ON AUTHORITY. 407 

tutes his definitions authoritative in matters of faith. 
The same is to be said of Councils. The authority, 
strictly speaking, is not in them as their own virtue 
or right, but in thef Holy Ghost who is present in 
them, and whose organs they are. The authority of 
the Church in matters of faith, therefore, enlightens 
as well as commands, convinces as well as obliges, 
because it is intrinsically the light and authority of 
absolute Truth ; and consequently belief on her au- 
thority is no blind belief, no blind submission to mere 
will or power, but an enlightened and reasonable be- 
lief, as much so as is or can be any belief on compe- 
tent and credible testimony. 

Of course, the authority, which in this case means 
the inward infallibility of the Church in teaching, 
must be established to the full satisfaction of reason, 
before we can reasonably believe any thing because 
she teaches it. But, this done, belief on her authority 
is not a mere submission to power, or a command, but 
a true surrender to the highest reason, and therefore 
a true, real, inward conviction, because her authority 
is intimately and necessarily connected with the truth 
of the things taught. That God can found such a 



408 ^ THE CONVERT. 

Church, and endow her with the inward authority, 
without violating the principles of the natural order, 
or in strict accordance with the principles and nature 
of natural reason, is shown by the doctrine of life by 
the communion of the object and subject, which I 
have already explained. Communion between God 
and man is possible, although only like communes 
with like, because man has in his own nature a like- 
ness to God. Human reason is the likeness in man 
of the Divine reason, and hence, nothing hinders in- 
tercommunion between the reason of God and the 
reason of man. Though Divine reason, as the object, 
is independent of the human, and does not, as Leroux 
maintained, live by communion with it, yet the hu- 
man reason lives only by communion with the Divine, 
as, in all cases, the subject lives only by communion 
with the object, and not reciprocally, the object by 
communion with the subject. By this communion, 
the subject partakes of the object, the human reason 
of the Divine reason, which is infinite, absolute truth. 
The Divine Being, in this communion established by 
himself, communicates the life of his own reason to 
the life of the subject, so that our reason lives in and 



BELIEF ON AUTHOKITY. 409 

by his reason. This is the origin and ground of the 
truth and authority of natural reason ; and this natural 
reason^ thus in communion with the Divine^ is the 
source and ground of the unity of the human race in 
the natural order, and the formative principle of nat- 
ural society ; that is, in so far as natural society 
is the society of men, and distinguishable from mere 
animal gregariousness. 

God does not exhaust his light in natural reason 
any more than he does his creative power in natural 
creation. In affirming himself in natural reason as 
the Intelligible, our reason itself bears witness that 
there is in him above what it apprehends, the infinite 
super-intelligible, that there are infinite depths in his 
being not intuitively affirmed to reason. Hence, 
nothing hinders God, if he chooses, from creating, in 
correspondence with the natural, as in his own being 
the super-intelligible is in correspondence with the 
intelUgible, a super-intelligible or a supernatural or- 
der, or from supernaturally elevating reason, and 
affirming himself to it as supernatural. In such 
case, there would be established between human rea- 
son and the Divine reason a supernatural communion, 
18 



410 THE CONVERT. 

whence would result, by the law of all communion, a 
supernaturalized life, constituting a new, supernatu- 
raHzed or regenerated humanity ; that is to say, the 
Church, or society, with a supernatural principle of 
unity and life, as distinguished from natural society. 
Suppose we become members of this supernatural 
society, by the election of grace, as we become 
members of natural society by natural generation, and 
we have not an adequate conception of the Church 
indeed, but nevertheless a conception of the Church 
as a society above natural reason, and living by com- 
munion with the Divine reason, in a sense higher 
than that in which the natural human race commune 
with it, and therefore in a sense in which it is au- 
thority for natural reason. 

This removes all the antecedent improbability of 
Catholicity, all the a^HoW objections to an authorita- 
tive church, and renders the fact of such a church as 
probable as any other historical fact. Take, now, the 
well-known traditions of the race, in all ages and na- 
tions, the authentic historical facts and monuments 
bearing on the question, together with the fact of the 
continued existence of such a society, under different 



BELIEF ON AUTHORITY. 411 

forms, or in different states, from the first, and which 
can no more be disputed than the existence of natural 
society, its identity with the Patriarchs, with the Jew- 
ish Synagogue, and since the accomplishment of the 
Incarnation, previously foretold, promised, and expect- 
ed, with the Eoman Catholic Apostolic Church, be- 
comes evident and undeniable ;(/for, if any thing can / 
be regarded as certain, it is that the Church in com- 
munion with the See of Eome is the successor of the 
Synagogue, the inheritor of the traditions of the race, 
the depositary of the revelations of God, and the liv- \ 
ing body of Christ on earth ; the real regenerated 
human society. Come thus far, and thus far philos- • 
ophy and history, faithfully studied and rightly ap-/ 
plied, do bring us ; the rest is easy, for then we may! 
take the Church herself as authority for her own ^v 
character and doctrine. ..--- 

This is the process by which I found my way to, 
the Catholic Church as the body of our Lord, hving : 
his Divine-human life, informed with his reason, hav- 
ing its personality in his Divine Person, and teaching 
with authority, because teaching with the hght an4 
truth of his Divinity. Evidently, then, the authoritjn 



412 THE CONVERT. 

■ of the Churcli in relation to the understanding is the 
inherent light and truth she lives by virtue of her 

supernatural communion with the Divine Incarnate 
i 

\ Keason or Word^ who is one with God, nay, is 
j 

[ God, as we are told in the proem of St. John's Gos- 
pel. In submitting to her I yielded to the highest 
reason, and my submission was intelligent, not an act 
discarding reason, but an act of reason itself in the 
full possession and free exercise of her highest powers. 
j No act of belief is, or can be more reasonable, and in 
performing it, I kept faithfully the resolution I made 
( on leaving Presbyterianism, that henceforth I would 
be true to my own reason, and maintain the rights 
and dignity of my own manhood. No man can ac- 
\ cuse me of not having don'e it. I never performed a 
( more reasonable, a more manly act, or one more in 
l accordance with the rights and dignity of human 
f nature, though not done save by Divine grace mov- 
' ing and assisting thereto, than when I kneeled to the 
i Bishop of Boston, and asked him to hear my confes- 
i sion and reconcile me to the Church, or when I read 
* my abjuration, and publicly professed the Catholic 
Faith ; for the basis of all true nobility of soul is 



BELIEF ON AUTHORITY. 413 

Christian humility, and nothing is more manly than 
/ submission to God, or more reasonable than to be- 
( lieve God's word on his own authority. 
^-^ To beKeve what the Church teaches, because she 
teaches it is in this, the Catholic view of the 
question, perfectly reasonable, because her teaching 
really is authority for reason, testimony to the under- 
standing, as well as a command to the will. Author- 
ity for believing is always necessary, and nothing is 
more unreasonable than to believe without authority. 
Belief without authority is credulity, is folly, or mad- 
ness ; not an act of reason, but an act of unreason. 
The same is true as to the supernatural oraer, which 
though above nature, is not contrary to it, but in 
its principles and laws in accordance with it. It is 
as reasonable to believe that on competent andr cred- 
ible testimony, as it is any fact of the natural order 
on the testimony of men or of monuments. The dif" 
ficulty men feel on this subject is that they conceive 
the supernatural as anti-natural, and the authority 
of the Church as simply power, giving an order or 
command addressed to the will, and communicating 
no light to the reason. This objection is valid 



414 THE CONVERT. 

against Calvinism and all the other forms of so-called 
Evangelical Protestantism, but does not avail against 
Catholicity ; because both the assumptions on which 
it rests are, as to Catholicity, misapprehensions, since 
Cathohcity presents the natural and supernatural in 
mutual accordance, as two distinct strings of the same 
harp, and authority as communicating light as well 
as issuing an order. I obey God's command because 
he is my sovereign, and has the right to command me ; 
I believe him because he is truth, and can neither 
deceive nor be deceived. I believe his word not be- 
cause it is his word as my sovereign, but because it is 
his word as the infinite, eternal, and unalterable truth^ 
absolute truth, the truth in itself, for God in relation 
to the intellect is the True, as in relation to the will' 
he is the Good. In relation to the %vill his word is im- 
perative, in relation to intellect it is Kght and truth, 
and produces inward conviction. 

- Taking this view of belief on the authority of the 
Church as an intellectual act, and advising my 
Catholic friends that I am not now engaged in 
treating of faith as a theological virtue, there can be 
no ground for the feehng so commonly entertained 



BELIEF ON AUTHORITY. 415 

by non-Catliolics, that the teachings and definitions 
of the Church must needs operate as restraints on 
mental freedom, and bring the Catholic into a de- 
grading intellectual bondage. Certainly her teach- 
ings, her dogmas, her definitions, do bind my will, 
inasmuch as they are authorized by my sovereign 
Lord and Proprietor, who has an absolute right to 
my obedience ; but inasmuch as they are at the 
same time light to my reason, and put me in posses- 
sion of the truth, they can restrain my intellectual 
freedom only in the sense that all truth possessed 
restrains it. They satisfy reason by providing it the 
communion, without which it cannot live. They 
place the mind in relation with its proper object, 
and thus save it from error and falsehood, which are 
its sickness and death. So far as this is to abridge 
our mental freedom, and reduce us to intellectual 
bondage, they undoubtedly do it, but no farther. 
Eeason can operate and live only by communion with 
the intelligible, and all error is unintelligible ; and 
I cannot persuade myself that any thing which saves 
the reason without violating her own laws from sick- 
ening and dying, is to be deplored. Whoever makes 



416 THE CONVERT. 

himself acquainted with the definitions of the 
Church, will find that they all tend to save reason 
as well as faith itself. I have never encountered a 
condemned proposition that was not an error against 
reason, as well as a sin against faith. For a man 
who wishes to err, to run off* into all manner of intel- 
lectual vagaries and extravagances, the Church, cer- 
tainly, is not his proper place ; he will not be able 
to gratify his insane propensity in her communion ; 
but he who would not woo darkness, who would not 
lose himself in doubt and perplexity, who would 
really open his eyes to the light, who would really 
exercise his reason according to her own laws, and 
live in communion with the truth, will find in her 
communion full freedom, and ample room to grow 
and expand to the full capacity of his nature with- 
out crowding or being crowded. 

I have been, during the thirteen years of my 
Catholic life, constantly engaged in the study of the 
Church and her doctrines, and especially in their 
relations to philosophy or natural reason. I have 
had occasion to examine and defend Catholicity 
precisely under those points of view which are the 



BELIEF ON AUTHORITY. 417 

/ most odious to my non-Catholic countrymen and to 
^x^ the Protestant- mind generally ; but I have never in 
a single instance found a single article^ dogma^ pro- 
position, or definition of faith, which embarrassed me 
as a logician, or which I would, so far as my own 
reason was concerned, have changed, or modified, or 
in any respect altered from what I found it, even if I 
had been free to do so. I have never found my rea- 
son struggling against the teachings of the Church, 
or felt it restrained, or myself reduced to a state of 
mental slavery. I have, as a Catholic, felt and en- 
joyed a mental freedom which I never conceived pos- 
sible while I was a non-Catholic. This is my expe- 
rience, and though not worth much, yet in this 
matter, whereof I have personal knowledge, it is 
- worth something, j 



'W 



CHAPTER XX. 

CONCLUSION. 

I HAVE now completed the sketcli I proposed to 
give of my intellectual straggles, failures, and suc- 
cesses, from my earliest childhood till my reception 
by the Bishop of Boston into the communion of the 
Catholic Church. I have not written to vindicate 
my ante-Catholic life, or to apologize for my conver- 
sion. I have aimed to record facts, principles, and 
reasonings, trials and sfruggles, which have a value 
independent of the fact that they relate to my per- 
sonal histoiy. Yet even as the personal history of 
an earnest soul, working its way, under the grace of 
God, from darkness to light, from the lowest abyss 
of unbelief to a firm, unwavering, and not a blind 
faith in the old religion, so generally rejected and 
decried by my countrymen, I think my story not 



CONCLUSION. 419 

wholly worthless, or altogether uninstructive, — 
especially when taken in connection with the glimpses 
it incidentally affords of American thought and life 
during the greater portion of the earlier half of the 
present century. Whether what I have written 
proves me to have been intellectually weak^ vacillat- 
ing, constantly changing, all things by turns, and 
nothing long, or tolerably firm, consistent, and per- 
severing in my search after truth ; whether it shows 
that my seeking admission into the Church for the 
reasons, and in the way and manner I did, was a sud- 
den caprice, an act of folly, perhaps of despair, or that 
it was an act of deliberation, wise, judicious, and for 
a sufficient reason, my readers are free to judge for 
themselves. 

This much only will I add, that whether I am 
beheved or not, I can say truly, that during the nearly 
thirteen years of Catholic experience, I have found 
not the slightest reason to regret the step I took. I 
have had much to try me, and enough to shake me, 
if shaken I could be, but I have not had even the 
slightest temptation to doubt, or the slightest incli- 
nation to undo what I had done, and have every day 



420 THE CONVERT. 

found new and stronger reasons to thank Almighty 
God for his great mercy in bringing me to the knowl- 
edge of his Churchy and permitting me to enter and 
live in her communion. I know all that can be said 
in disparagement of Catholics. I am well versed^ 
perhaps no man more so^ in Catholic scandals ; but 
I have not been deceived ; I have found all that was 
promised me, all I looked for. I have found the 
Church all that her ministers represented her, all my 
imagination painted her, and infinitely more than I 
had conceived it possible for her to be. My experi- 
ence as a Catholic, so far as the Church, her doctrines, 
her morals, her discipline, her influences are concerned, 
has been a continued succession of agreeable surprises. 
I do not pretend that I have found the Catholic 
population perfect, or that I have found in them or in 
myself no short-comings, nothing to be censured or re- 
gretted ; yet I have found that population superior to 
what I expected, more intellectual, more cultivated, 
more moral, more active, living, and energetic. Un- 
doubtedly, our Catholic population, made up in great 
part of the humbler classes of the Catholic populations 
of the Old World, for three hundred years subjected to 



CONCLUSION. 421 

the bigotry, intolerance, persecutions, and oppressions 
of Protestant or quasi'T?Totestant governments, have 
traits of character, habits, and manners, which the 
outside non-Catholic American finds unattractive, 
and even repulsive. Certainly in our cities and large 
towns may be found, I am sorry to say, a comparatively 
numerous population, nominally Catholic, who are no 
credit to their religion, to the land of their birth, or 
to that of their adoption. No Cathohc will deny 
that the children of these are to a great extent 
shamefully neglected, and suffered to grow up with- 
out the simplest elementary moral and religious in- 
struction, and to become recruits to our vicious pop- 
ulation, our rowdies, and our criminals. This is cer- 
tainly to be deplored, but can easily be explained 
without prejudice to the Church, by adverting to the 
condition to which these individuals were reduced 
before coming here; to their disappointments and dis- 
couragements in a strange land ; to their exposure to 
new and unlocked for temptations ; to the fact that 
they were by no means the best of Catholics even in 
their native countries ; to their poverty, destitution, 
ignorance, insufficient culture, and a certain nat- 



422 THE CONVERT. 

ural sliiftlessness and recklessness, and to our great 
lack of schools, churclies, and priests. , The propor- 
tion, too, that these bear to our whole* Catholic pop- 
ulation is far less than is commonly supposed, and 
they are not so habitually depraved as they appear, 
for they seldom or never consult appearances, and 
have little skill in concealing their vices. As low and 
degraded as they are, they never are so low or so 
vicious as the corresponding class of Protestants in 
Protestant nations. A Protestant vicious class is 
always worse than it appears, a Catholic vicious pop- 
ulation is less bad. In the worst there is always 
some germ that with proper care may be nursed into 
life, that may blossom and bear fruit. In our nar- 
row lanes, blind courts, damp cellars, and unventi- 
lated garrets, where our people swarm as bees, — ^in 
the midst of filth and the most squaM wretchedness, 
the fumes of intemperance and the shouts and im- 
precations of blasphemy, — ^in what by the outside 
world would be regarded as the very dens of vice and 
crime, and infamy, we often find individuals who it 
may well be presumed have retained their baptismal 
innocence, real Fleurs de Marie, who remain pure 



CONCLUSION. 423 

and unsullied^ and who, in their humble sphere, ex- 
hibit brilliant examples of the most heroic Christian 
virtues. 

The majority of our Catholic population is made up 
of the unlettered peasantry, small mechanics, servant 
girls, and common laborers, from various European 
countries, and however worthy in themselves, or use- 
ful to the country to which they have migrated, 
cannot, in a worldly and social point of view at least, be 
taken as a fair average of the Catholic population in 
their native lands. The Catholic nobility, gentry, 
easy classes, and the better specimens of the pro- 
fessional men, have not migrated with them. Two 
or three millions of the lower, less prosperous, and less 
cultivated, and sometimes less virtuous class of the 
European Catholic populations, have in a compara- 
tively brief period been cast upon our shores, 
with little or no provision made for their intellectual, 
moral, or rehgious wants. Yet, if we look at this 
population as it is, and is every year becoming, we 
cannot but be struck with its marvellous energy and 
progress. The mental activity of Catholics, all things 
considered, is far more remarkable than that of our 



424 THE CONVEBT. 

non-Catliolic countrymen^ and in proportion to their 
numbers and means, they contribute far more than 
any other class of American citizens to the purposes 
of education, both common and liberal, for they re- 
ceive little or nothing from the public treasury, and 
in addition to supporting numerous schools of their 
own, they contribute their quota to the support of 
those of the State. 

I do not pretend that the Catholic population of 
this country are a highly literary people, or that they 
are in any adequate Ksense an intellectually cultivated 
people. How could they be, when the great mass of 
them have had to earn their very means of subsistence, 
and have had as much as they could do to provide 
for the first wants of religion, and of themselves and 
families. Yet there is a respectable Catholic- Amer- 
ican literature springing up among us, and Catholics 
have their representatives among the first scholars 
and scientific men in the land. In metaphysics, in 
moral and intellectual philosophy, they take already 
the lead ; in natural history and the physical sci- 
ences, they are not far behind ; and let once the barrier 
between them and the non-Catholic public be broken 



CONCLUSION. 425 

down^ and they will soon take the first position in 
general and polite literature. As yet our own litera- 
ry public^ owing to the causes I have mentioned^ I 
admit is not large enough to give adequate encour- 
agement to authors^ and the general public makes it 
a point not to recognize our literary labors. But 
this will not last^ for it is against the interest and 
the genius of liberal scholarship, and Catholic authors 
will soon find a public adequate to their wants. Non- 
Catholics do themselves great wrong in acting on the 
principle, no good can come out of Nazareth ; for we 
have already in what we ourselves write, in what 
we reprint from our brethren in the British Empire, 
and in what we translate from French, German, 
Spanish, and ItaUan Catholics, a literature far richer 
and more important even under a literary and scien- 
tific point of view, than they suspect. 

I have known long and well the Protestant clergy 
of the United States, and I am by no means disposed 
to underrate their native abilities or their learning 
and science, and, although I think the present gene- 
ration of ministers falls far below its predecessor, I 
esteem highly the contributions they have made and 



426 THE CONVERT. 

are making to the literature and science of our com- 
mon country ; but our Catholic clergy, below in many 
respects what for various reasons they should be, can 
compare more than favorably with them, except those 
among them whose mother tongue was foreign from 
ours, in the correct and classical use of the English lan- 
guage. They surpass them as a body in logical train- 
ing, in theological science, and in the accuracy, and 
not unfrequently in the variety and extent of their 
erudition. Indeed, I have found among Catholics, a 
higher tone of thought, morals, manners, and society, 
than I have ever found, with fair opportunities, among 
my non-Catholic countrymen, and taking the Cath- 
olic population of the country even as it actually is, 
under all its disadvantages, there is nothing in it that 
need make the most cultivated and refined man of 
letters or of society blush to avow himself a Catho- 
Uc. 

Certainly, I have found cause to complain of 
Catholics at home and abroad, not indeed as falling 
below non-Catholic populations, but as falling below 
their own Catholic standard. I find among them, 
not indeed as universal, far from it, but as too preva- 



CONCLUSION. 4Sn 

lent habits of thought and modes of action, a lack of 
manly courage, energy, and directness, which seem 
to me as unwise as they are offensive to the better 
class of English and American minds. In matters 
not of faith, there is less unanimity, and less liberal- 
ity, less courtesy, and less forbearance in regard to 
allowable differences of opinion, than might be ex- 
pected. But I have recollected that I am not myself 
infaUible, and may complain where I should not. 
Many things may seem to me wrong, only because I 
am not accustomed to them. Something must be set 
down to peculiarity of national temperament and de- 
velopment,and even what cannot be justified or excused 
on either ground,can in all cases be traced to causes un- 
connected with religion. The habits and peculiarities 
which I find it most difiicult to like, are evidently 
due to the fact that the Catholics of this country 
have migrated for the most part from foreign Catho- 
lic populations, that have either been oppressed by 
non-Catholic governments directing their policy to 
crush and extinguish Catholicity, or by poUtical des- 
potisms which sprang up in Europe after the disas- 
trous Protestant revolt in the sixteenth century, and 



428 THE CONVERT. 

whicli recognized in the common people no rights, 
and allowed them no equality with the ruling class. 
Under the despotic governments of some Catholic 
countries, and the bigotry and intolerance of Pro- 
testant States, they could hardly fail to acquire 
habits not in accordance with the habits of those who 
have never been persecuted, and have never been 
forced in order to live to study to evade tyrannical 
laws, or the caprices of despotism. Men who are 
subjected to tyranny, who have to deal with tyrants, 
and who feel that power is against them, and that 
they can never carry their points by main force, nat- 
urally study diplomacy, and supply by art what they 
lack in strength. This art may degenerate into 
craft. That it occasionally does so with individuals here 
and elsewhere, it were useless to deny ; but the cause 
is not in the Church or any thing she teaches or ap- 
proves. In fact, many things which Englishmen and 
Americans complain of in Catholics and the popula- 
tions of Southern Europe, have been inherited from 
the craft and refinement of the old Graeco-Eoman 
civilization, and transmitted from generation to gen- 
eration in spite of the Church. 



CONCLUSION. 429 

As yet our Catholic population^ whether foreign 
born or native born, hardly dare feel themselves free- 
men in this land of freedom. They have so long 
been an oppressed people, that their freedom here 
seems hardly real. They have never become recon- 
ciled to the old Puritan Commonwealth of England, 
and they retain with their Catholicity too many 
reminiscences of the passions and politics of the 
Bourbons and the Stuarts. They are very generally 
attached to the republican institutions of the country, 
no class of our citizens more so, and would defend 
them at the sacrifice of their lives,but their interior life 
has not as yet been moulded into entire harmony with 
them, and they have a tendency in seeking to follow 
out American democracy to run into extreme radical- 
ism, or when seeking to preserve law and order, to run 
into extreme conservatism. They do not always hit 
the exact medium. But this need not surprise us, 
for no one can hit that medium unless his interior 
life and habits have been formed to it. Non-Catholic 
foreigners are less able than Catholic foreigners to do 
it, if we except the English, who have been trained 
under a system in many respects analogous to our 



430 THE CONVERT. 

own ; and no small portion of our own countrymen, 
^^ to the manner born/' make even more fatal mistakes 
than are made by any portion of our Catholic popu- 
lation, — chiefly, however, because they adopt a Euro- 
pean instead of an American interpretation of our 
political and social order. Other things being equal, 
Catholic foreigners far more readily adjust themselves 
to our institutions than any other class of foreigners, 
and among Catholics it must be observed that they 
succeed best who best understand and best practise 
their religion. They who are least truly American, 
and yield most to the demagogues, are those who have 
very little of Catholicity except the accident of being 
born of Catholic parents, who had them baptized in 
infancy. These are they who bring reproach on the 
whole body. 

Undoubtedly there is in Catholic, as well as in 
non-Catholic states, much that no wise man, no good 
man can defend, or fail to deplore. I have not trav- 
elled abroad, but I have listened to those who have, 
and I claim to know a little of the languages and 
literatures of Southern Europe. From the best in- 
formation I can get, I do not believe that things are 



CONCLUSION. 431 

so bad in Spain, Portugal, and Italy, as Protestant 
travellers tell ns, nor that the political and social con- 
dition of the people in those. states is so beautiful or 
so happy as now and then a Catholic, who imagines 
that he must eulogize whatever he finds in a Catholic 
state, or done by men who call themselves Cathohc, 
in his pious fervor pretends. Yet be the political 
and social condition of the people in these coun- 
tries as bad as it may be, it does not disturb my 
Catholic faith, or damp my Catholic ardor. All the 
modern Catholic states of Europe grew up under 
Catholicity, and were more Catholic than they are 
now, at the period of their greatest prosperity and 
power. The decline which is alleged, and which I 
have no disposition to deny, in the Italian and Span- 
ish Peninsulas, is fairly traceable to poUtical, econom- 
ical, commercial, and other causes, independent in 
their operation of Catholicity, or of religion of any 
sort. Moreover, as a Catholic, I am under no obli- 
gation to defend the poHcy or the administration of 
so-called Catholic governments, not even the pohcy 
and administration of the temporal government of the 
Papal States. The Pope, as Supreme Doctor and 



432 THE CONVERT. 

Judge of the Deposit of faith^ in teacliing and defin- 
ing the faith of the Church, I hold is, by the super- 
natural assistance of the Holy Ghost promised to his 
office, infallible, and I accept his definitions, ex animo^ 
the moment they reach me in an authentic shape ; 
but I am aware of no law of the Church, of no prin- 
ciple of Catholicity, that requires me to believe him 
infallible in matters of simple administration, which 
our Lord has left to human prudence. In these mat- 
ters, so far as they are directly or indirectly ecclesi- 
astical, I obey him as the Supreme Governor of the 
Church, as I obey the constitution and laws of my 
country, not because it is impossible for him to err, 
but because he is my divinely appointed ruler. Much 
less am I bound to beUeve in the infellibility^ or im- 
peccability of nominally Catholic sovereigns and states. 
I am as free to criticize, to blame the acts of the 
Catholic as I am non- Catholic governments, and as 
free to dispute the political doctrines of Catholics, 
whether monarchical, aristocratical, or democratical, 
as I am the political doctrines of non-Catholics. The 
Church prescribes and proscribes no particular form of 
government ; she simply asserts that power in whose 



CONCLUSION. 433 

hands soever lodged, or however constituted, is a 
trust, and to be administered for the common good 
on pain of forfeiture. 

As a matter of fact, no doubt that much of what 
is objectionable or deplorable in Catholic Europe is 
due to the character of the governments which have 
existed and governed the Catholic populations^ since 
the epoch of the Protestant revolt ; and the chief ob- 
stacle to the revival and progress of Catholic civiliza- 
tion in Catholic states as well as the recovery to the 
Church of the mass of European Liberals, now bitterly- 
hostile to Catholicity, there is just as little doubt, 
is to be found in the habits and manners generated by 
political and civil despotism. Catholicity leaves to 
every people its own nationality, and to every state 
its indepejidence ; and it ameliorates the political 
and social order only by infusing into the hearts of 
the people and their rulers the principles of justice 
•and love, and a sense of accountability to God. The 
action of the Church in political and social matters 
is indirect, not direct, and in strict accordance with 
the free will of individuals and the autonomy of states. 

Individuals may hold very erroneous notions on gov- 
19 



434 THE CONVERT. 

ernment, and sustain their rulers in a very unwise 
and disastrous policy, without necessarily impeach- 
ing their Catholic faith or piety. To be a good 
Catholic and save his soul, it is not necessary that a 
man should be a wise and profound statesman. 

The Protestant movement, directed chiefly against 
the Papacy, and involving as it did a hundred years of 
so-called religious wars, gave the princes who took 
the side of the Church an opportunity, of which they 
were not slow to avail themselves, to extend and con- 
solidate their power over their Catholic subjects, and 
to establish in their dominions monarchical abso- 
lutism, or what I choose to call modern Caesarism. 
They extended, under plea of serving religion, their 
power over matters which had hitherto either been 
left free or subjected only to the jurisdiction of the 
spiritual authority. They were defenders of the faith 
against armed heretics, and to restrict their power, 
they pretended, would be to embarrass them in their 
defence of the Church. A habit of depending on 
them as the external defenders of religion and her 
altars, the freedom of conscience, and Catholic civili- 
zation itself, was generated ; the king took the place 



CONCLUSION. 435 

in the thouglits and affections of the people due to the 
Sovereign Pontiff, and by giving the direction to the 
schools and universities in all things not absolutely of 
faith, they gradually became the lords of men's minds 
as well as bodies. In France, Spain, Portugal, and a 
large part of Italy, all through the seventeenth cen- 
tury the youth were trained in the maxim, the 
Prince is the state, and his pleasure is law. Bossuet, 
in his politics, did only faithfully express the politi- , 
cal sentiments and convictions of his age, shared by 
the great body of Catholics as well as of non-Catholics. 
Kational liberty had few defenders, and they were 
exiled, like Fenelon, from the Court. The politics 
of Philip II. of Spain, of Eichelieu, Mazarin, and 
Louis XIV. in France, which were the politics of 
Catholic Europe, hardly opposed except by the Popes, 
through the greater part of the sixteenth, and the 
whole of the seventeenth centuries, tended directly to 
enslave the people, and to restrict the freedom and 
efficiency of the Church. Had either Philip, or after 
him Louis, succeeded, by linking the Catholic cause to 
his personal ambition, in realizing his dream of uni- 
versal monarchy, Europe would most likely have been 



436 THE CONVERT. 

plunged into a political and social condition as unen- 
viable as tliat into which, old Asia has been plunged 
for these four hundred years ; and it may well be be- 
lieved that it was Providence that raised and directed 
the tempest that scattered the Grand Armada, and 
that gave victory to the arms of Eugene and Marl- 
borough. 

Trained under despotic influences, by the skilful 
hand of despotism, extending to all matters not ab- 
solutely of the sanctuary, and sometimes daring with 
sacrilegious foot to invade the sanctuary itself, the 
people were gradually formed interiorly as well as ex- 
teriorly to the purposes of the despot. They grew 
up with the habits and beliefs which Caesarism, when 
not resisted, is sure to generate. The clergy sympa- 
thizing, as is the case with every national clergy, with 
the sentiments of their age and nation in all not 
strictly of faith, had little disposition to labor to keep 
alive the spirit of freedom in the heart of the people, 
and would not have been permitted to do it, even if 
they had been so disposed. Schools were sustained, 
but, affected by the prevailing despotism, education 
declined ; free thought was prohibited, and it is 



CONCLUSION. 437 

hard to find a literature tamer, less original, and liv- 
ing than that of Catholic Europe all through the 
eighteenth century, down almost to our own times. 

As the Catholic religion was professedly patron- 
ized by the sovereigns, the Church, in superficial 
minds, seemed to sanction the prevailing Caesarism. 
The clergy, because they preached peace, and sought 
to fulfil their mission without disturbing the state, 
came, for the first time in history, to be regarded as 
the chief supporters of the despot. They who re- 
tained some reminiscences of the liberties once en- 
joyed by Catholic Europe, and the noble principles of 
freedom asserted in the Middle Ages by the monks 
in their cells, and the most eminent doctors of the 
Church from their chairs, became alienated from 
Catholicity, in proportion as they cherished the 
spirit of resistance, and unhappily imbibed the fatal 
conviction that to overthrow the absolute throne they 
must break down the altar. Kightly interpreted, 
the old French Kevolution, although bitterly anti- 
Catholic and infidel, was not so much hatred of re- 
ligion and impatience of her salutary restraints, as 
the indignant uprising of a misgoverned people against 



438 THE CONVERT. 

a civil despotism that affected injuriously all orders^ 
ranks, and conditions of society. The sovereigns had 
taken good care that an attack on them should in- 
volve an attack on religion, and to have it deeply im- 
pressed on their subjects that resistance to them was 
rebellion against Grod. The priest who should have 
labored publicly to correct the issue made up by the 
sovereigns in accord with unbelievers, would have 
promoted sedition, and done more harm than good ; 
besides, he would have been at once reduced to si- 
lence, in some one of the many ways despotism has 
usually at its command. 

The horrors of the French Kevolution, the uni- 
versal breaking up of society it involved, the perse- 
cution of the Church and of her clergy and her re- 
ligious it shamelessly introduced in the name of 
liberty, the ruthless war it waged upon religion, vir- 
tue, all that wise and good men hold sacred, not un- 
naturally, to say the least, tended to create in the 
minds of the clergy and the people who remained 
firm in their faith and justly regarded religion as the 
first want of man and society, a deeper distrust of the 
practicability of liberty, and a deeper horror of all 



CONCLUSION. 439 

movements attempted in its name. This, again, as 
naturally tended to alienate tlie party clamoring 
for political and social reform still more from Catho- 
licity ; which in its turn has reacted with new force 
on the Catholic party and made them still more^deter- 
mined in their anti-Liberal convictions and efforts. 
These tendencies on both sides have been aggravated 
by the recent European revolutions and repressions, 
till now almost everywhere the lines are well defined, 
and the so-called Liberals are, almost to a man, bit- 
terly anti-Catholic, and the sovereigns seem to have 
succeeded in forcing the issue : The Church and 
Cassarism, or Liberty and Infidelity. 

Certainly, as religion is of the highest necessity to 
man and society, infinitely more important than po- 
litical freedom, and social well-being, I am unable to 
conceive how the Catholic party, under the circum- 
stances, could well have acted differently. Their 
error was in their want of vigilance and sagacity in 
the beginning, in suffering the political Caesarism to 
revive and consolidate itself in the state, or the sov- 
ereigns in the outset to force upon the Catholic world 
so false an issue, or to place them in so unnatural 



440 THE CONVERT. 

and so embarrassing a position. How they will ex- 
tricate themselves in the Old World from that posi- 
tion, I am unable to foresee, for every movement on 
either side only makes the matter worse. Yet the 
internal peace and tranquillity of Catholic states can- 
not be restored, and the Liberals brought back to the 
Church in any human way that I can see, unless 
the Catholic party abate something of their opposi- 
tion, exert themselves to change the issue the sov- 
ereigns have forced upon them, and take themselves 
the lead in introducing, in a legal and orderly way, 
such changes in the present political order as will 
give the body of the nation an effective voice in 
the management of public affairs. Rebellions, when 
they break out, must of course be put down, but at 
the same time every effort should be made to discon- 
nect religion from the cause of despotism, and to 
remove every legitimate source of discontent. All 
attempts to remedy the existing evil by decrying 
liberty, by sneers or elaborate essays against parlia- 
mentary governments and their advocates, by perma- 
nently strengthening the hands of power, by muz- 
zling the press, abridging the freedom of thought and 



CONCLUSION* 441 

speech, or by resorting to a merely repressive policy, 
which silences without convincing, and irritates with- 
out healing, are short-sighted and unstatesmanlike. 
They can at best be only momentary palliatives which 
leave the disease uneradicated, to spread in the sys- 
tem ^ and to break out anew with increased virulence 
and force. The truth is, the Catholic party, yield- 
ing to the sovereigns, lost to some extent, for the 
eighteenth century, the control of the mind of the 
age, and failed to lead its intelligence. They must 
now recover their rightful leadership, and be first and 
foremost in every department of human thought and 
activity ; and to be so, they must yield in matters not 
of faith, not essential to sound doctrine, or to the 
free and full operation of the Church in all her na- 
tive rights, integrity, and force, but in political and 
social matters subjected to human prudence, — they 
must, I say, yield something to the changes and de- 
mands of the times. 

That the struggles in Europe have an influence 
on Catholic thought in this country is very true, and 
sometimes an unfavorable influence, cannot be denied. 

A portion of our foreign-born Catholics, subjected at 
19^^ 



442 THE CONVERT. 

home to the restraints imposed by despotism^ feel on 
coming here that they are loosed from all restraints, 
and forgetting the obedience they owe to their 
pastors, to the prelates whom the Holy Ghost has 
placed over them, become insubordinate, and live 
more as Protestants than as Catholics ; another por- 
tion, deeply alarmed at the revolutionary spirit, and 
the evils that it has produced in the Old World, dis- 
trust the independence and personal dignity the 
American always preserves in the presence of author- 
ity, and are half disposed to look upon every American 
as a rebel at heart, if not an unbeliever. They do not 
precisely understand the American disposition that 
bows to the law, but never to persons, and is always 
careful to distinguish between the man and the office, 
and they are disposed to look upon it as incompatible 
with the true principle of obedience demanded by the 
Gospel. But I think these and their conservative 
brethren in Europe mistake the real American char- 
acter. There is not in Christendom a more loyal or a 
more law-abiding people than the genuine people of 
the United States. I think European Catholics of the 
conservative party have an unfounded suspicion of our 



CONCLUSION. 443 

loyalty, for I think it a higher and truer loyalty than 
that which they seem to inculcate. I have wholly mis- 
taken the spirit of the Church, if an enlightened obe- 
dience, an obedience that knows wherefore it obeys, 
and is yielded from principle, from conviction, from 
free will, and from a sense of obligation, is not more 
grateful to her maternal heart than the blind, unrea- 
soning, and cringing submission of those who are 
strangers to freedom. Servile fear does not rank 
very high with Catholic theologians, and the Church 
seeks to govern men as freemen, as Almighty God 
governs them, that is, in accordance with the nature 
with which he has created them, as beings endowed 
with reason and free will. God adapts his govern- 
ment to our rational and voluntary faculties, and gov- 
erns us without violence to either, and by really sat- 
isfying both. The Church does the same, and resorts 
to coercive measures only to repress disorders in the 
public body. Hence our ecclesiastical rulers are 
called shepherds, not lords, and shepherds of their 
Master's flock, not of their own, and are to feed, 
tend, protect the flock, and take care of its increase 
for him, with sole reference to his will, and his 



444 THE CONVERT, 

honor and glory. We must love and reverence them 
for his sake, for the great trust he has confided to 
them, not for their own sakes, as if they owned the 
flock, and governed it in their own name and right, 
for their own pleasure and profit. This idea of 
power, whether in Church or State, as a delegated 
power or trust, is inseparable from the American 
mind, and hence the American feels always in its 
presence his native equality as a man, and asserts, 
even in the most perfect and entire submission, his 
own personal independence and dignity, knowing that 
he bows only to the law or to the will of a common 
Master. His submission he yields because he knows 
that it is due, but without servility or pusillanimity. 
But though I entertain these views of what have 
been for a long time the policy of so called Catholic 
governments, and so to speak, the politics of Europe- 
an Catholics, I find in them nothing that reflects on 
the truth or efficiency of the Church ; for she has no 
responsibility in the matter, since, as I have said, 
she governs men, discharges her mission with a scru- 
pulous regard to the free will of individuals and the 
autonomy of states. She proffers to all every assist- 



CONCLUSION. 445 

ance necessary for the attainment of the most heroic 
sanctity, but she forces no man to accept that assist- 
ance. In her view, men owe all they have and are to 
God, but they are neither slaves nor machines. 

In speaking of Catholic nations and comparing 
them with the Catholic standard, I find, I confess, 
much to regret, to deplore, and even to blame ; but 
in comparing them with non-Catholic nations, the 
case is quite different, and I cannot concede that the 
Catholic population of any country is inferior to any 
Protestant population, even in those very qualities 
in respect to which Catholics are usually supposed to 
be the most deficient. In no Catholic population will 
you find the flunky ism which Carlyle so unmercifully 
ridicules in the middling classes of Great Britain, or 
that respect to mere wealija, that worship of the 
money-bag, or that base servility to the mob or 
to public opinion, so common and so ruinous to 
pubUc and private virtue in the United States. I 
do not claim any very high merit for our Catholic 
press ; it lacks, with some exceptions, dignity, grasp 
of thought, and breadth of view, and seems intended 
for an xmlettered community ; but it has an earnest- 



446 THE CONVERT. 

ness, a sincerity^ a freedom, an independence, whicli 
will be looked for in vain in our non-Catholic press, 
whether religious or secular. The Catholic population 
of this country, too, taken as a body, have a personal 
freedom, an independence, a self-respect, a conscien- 
tiousness, a love of truth, and a devotion to principle, 
not to be found in any other class of American citizens. 
Their moral tone, as well as their moral standard, is 
higher, and they act more uniformly under a sense of 
deep responsibility to Grod and to their country. Ow- 
ing to various circumstances as well as national pecu- 
liarities, a certain number of them fall easily under 
the influence of demagogues, but as a body, they are 
far less -demagogical and far less under the influence of 
demagogues, than are non- Catholic Americans. He 
who knows both classes equally well, will not pretend 
to the contrary. The Catholics of this country, by no 
means a fair average of the Catholic populations of old 
Catholic countries, do, as to the great majority, act 
from honest principle, from sincere and earnest convic- 
tion, and are prepared to die sooner than in any grave 
matters swerve from what they regard as truth and 
justice. They have the principle and the firmness 



CONCLUSION. 447 

to stand by what they believe true and just, in good 
report and evil report, whether the world be with 
them or be against them. They can, also, be con- 
vinced by arguments addressed to their reason, and 
moved by appeals to conscience, to the fear of God, 
and the love of justice. The non-Catholic has no 
conception of the treasure the Union possesses in these 
two or three millions of Catholics, humble in their 
outward circumstances as the majority of them are. I 
have never shown any disposition topalhate or disguise 
their faults, but knowing them and my non-Catholic 
countrymen as I do, I am willing to risk the asser- 
tion that with all their faults and short-comings, 
they are the salt of the American community, and 
the really conservative element in the American pop- 
ulation. 

I have found valid after thirteen years of experi- 
ence none of those objections to entering the Catholic 
communion which I enumerated in a previous chap- 
ter, and which made me for a time hesitate to follow 
the convictions of my own understanding. To err is 
human, and I do not pretend that I have found 
Catholics in matters of human prudence, in what be- 



448 THE CONVERT. 

longs to them and not tlie Church, all that I could 
wish. I have found much I do not like, much I do 
not believe reasonable or prudent ; but it is all easily 
explained without any reflection on the truth or effi- 
ciency of the Churchy or the general wisdom and pru- 
dence of her prelates and clergy. Undoubtedly our 
Catholic population, made up in great part of emi- 
grants from every nation of Europe, with every variety 
of national temper, character, taste, habit, and usage, 
not yet moulded, save in religion, into one homogene- 
ous body, may present features more or less repulsive 
to the American wedded to his own peculiar nation- 
ality' and but recently converted to the Catholic 
faith ; but the very readiness with which these hetero- 
geneous elements amalgamate, and the rapidity with 
which the CathoUc body assumes a common charac- 
ter, falls into the current of American life, and takes, 
in all not adverse to religion, the tone and features 
of the country, proves the force of Catholicity, and 
its vast importance in forming a true and noble na- 
tional character, and in generating and sustaining a 
true, generous, and lofty patriotism. In a few years 
they will be the Americans of the Americans, and on 



CONCLUSION. 449 

them will rest tlie performance of the glorious work 
of sustaining American civilization, and realizing the 
hopes of the founders of our great and growing Ke- 
public. 

Such are the views, feelings, convictions, and 
hopes of the Convert. But he would be unjust to 
himself and to his religion, if he did not say, that not 
for these reasons, or any Uke them, is he a Catholic. 
He loves his country, loves her institutions, he loves 
her freedom, but he is a Catholic because he believes 
the Catholic Church the Church of God, because he 
believes her the medium through which God dis- 
penses his grace to man, and through which alone we 
can hope for heaven. He is a Catholic, because he 
would believe, love, possess, and obey the truth, be- 
cause he would know and do God's will, because he 
would escape hell and gain heaven. Considerations 
drawn from this world are of minor importance, for 
man's home is not here, his bliss is not here, his re- 
ward is not here ; he is made for God, for endless 
beatitude with him, hereafter, and let him turn as 
he will, his supreme good as well as duty lies, in 
seeking '^ the Kingdom of God and his justice.'' 



450 THE CONVERT. 

That the Church serves the cause of patriotism, 
that if embraced, it is sure to give us a high-toned and 
chivalric national character, that it enlists^ conscience 
in the support of our free institutions and the preser- 
vation of our republican freedom as the established 
order of the country, is a good reason why the Ameri- 
can people should not oppose her, and why they should 
wish her growth and prosperity in our country ; but 
the real reason why we should become Catholics and 
remain such, is because she is the new creation, re- 
generated Humanity, and without communion with 
her, we can never see God as he is, or become united 
to him as our Supreme Good in the supernatural 
order. 



FINIS. 



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